Comparing the Pictures of Robinson and Muybridge
Henry Peach Robinson is regarded as the most influential of all the art photographers. During his youth, he was an amateur painter and like some other famous photographers of his time, exhibited at the Royal Academy. Robinson ventured into art photography as a way of demonstrating the inaccuracy of the prevalent notion that photography could not be able to influence the feelings and emotions of individuals. He then started making photographs that imitated the themes and compositions of the anecdotal genre paintings that were famous at the time. His first composition was the Fading Away, which was exhibited in 1858. Through the photograph, Robinson aimed at evoking emotions of pain. Fading Away depicts a very sick young woman in her bed, with three family member surrounding her. While her mother and sister are looking at her, the father is leaning on the window, his back to the viewer. Robinson succeeded in proving that photography, just like paintings, could arouse emotions using a contrast between dark and light. The photograph was however publicly criticized due to its morbid sentiment. Despite this criticism, no one opposed the artificiality of the picture since Henry had staged the whole thing using professional models then combined five negatives to create the final montaged look. This technique of combination printing made him achieve painterly effects in photography. Robinson’s production of these compositions was not only recognized in England in the whole continent and even in America.
The Woman Pouring Basin of Water over Another Woman’s Head is from Eadweard Muybridge’s book, Animal Locomotion: an Electro-Photogenic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements. The picture shows in sequence, a naked woman stepping onto a chair then pouring water on a naked woman seated in a basin, depicting the bigger picture of motion. The exposures are arranged tightly together with a thin black border, and the women are centered in each frame. In 1878, the governor of California, Leland Stanford, hired Muybridge, a photographer, to conduct an experiment on whether a horse at one point had all its hooves off the ground while it galloped. Muybridge began the experiment using 12 cameras with tripwires. This was not efficient so he developed a camera with a faster shutter speed that could capture motions in much shorter intervals. Between 1883 and 1886, Muybridge engaged in studies on animal locomotion, which included humans, at the University of Pennsylvania. Support from the faculty of science, the academic affiliation and the endorsement of Thomas Eakins made it possible for Muybridge to publish images that could have been otherwise considered obscene, nude posing. To capture these movements, he used multiple cameras and was able to expand the aesthetic and conceptual knowledge of the human body and that of animals. He produced tens of thousands of grid pictures of various people and animals similar to the Woman Pouring Basin of Water over Another Woman’s Head.
Robinson and Muybridge’s work display different dimensions of art that were not as popular in the 19th century, Muybridge’s photography being able to capture movement and Robinson’s pictures being a product of manipulation. Both works warrant a narrative as the work of Muybridge is consistently arranged to form a visually compelling narrative of the appearance of the female bodies and their movements. Robinson’s work warrants a narrative of what the woman on the bed is suffering from, how she got there and who the people around her are. The use of dark and light contrast, a common feature in the 19th century, is incorporated in both works. The borders of the pictures are also dark to concentrate focus on the characters. The final images are similar as they are combinations of several pictures.
Muybridge pictures were taken using a single camera with multiple lenses or with multiple cameras, which enabled him to capture motion in short intervals and then publishing the images in grids to display movement paused at different moments. Robinson, on the other hand, took pictured in stages, photographing one individual at a time, cutting the figures out then pasting them on the separately photographed background and foreground. After retouching the outlines, he would then photograph the whole picture to produce the final version. While Muybridge’s nude characters are engaged in an activity, Robinson’s fully clothed characters are posing. Muybridge aimed at using photography to capture images hidden from human perception, motion studies, while Robinson aimed at proving the ability of photographs to arouse emotions. In this case, Muybridge’s grids of instantaneous photographs were published mainly for scientific experimentation while Robinson’s pictures were published with artistic ambitions. Robinson’s photo contains elements of symbolism drawn from the 19th-century paintings, with the white clothes of the two young women denoting innocence and purity. Muybridge’s picture does not include any form of symbolism. Unlike Muybridge, Robinson incorporated clouds in his image, a famous aspect of aesthetics in their time.
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