Plate Number 433. Wringing clothes
Medium
collotype
Dimensions
image: 19 × 38.5 cm (7 1/2 × 15 3/16 in.) sheet: 48.2 × 61.2 cm (19 × 24 1/8 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, 1887)
Accession Number
2014.79.435
Art Historical Context
Eadweard Muybridge's *Plate Number 433. Wringing Clothes* (1887) captures a sequence of a woman's everyday labor in meticulous detail, part of his groundbreaking *Animal Locomotion* series. This collotype print, reproduced from photographs taken with a battery of 24 cameras synchronized to shutters triggered by the subject's movement, freezes the fluid action of wringing wet fabric into 12 sequential frames. Muybridge, a pioneering photographer, developed these chronophotographic techniques in the 1880s after proving a horse lifts all four hooves off the ground while galloping, revolutionizing...
About the Artist
Eadweard Muybridge · 1830–1904
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was an English-American photographer who revolutionized the understanding of motion through his pioneering chronophotographic studies. Born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames, England, he emigrated to America and became famous first for his dramatic landscape photographs of Yosemite Valley, then for his groundbreaking motion studies that proved horses li...