Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

From ‘the horse in motion’ to ‘man in motion’

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17460650500057079

1746-0662

Kaveh Askari,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For an earlier example of the attempt to recoup Black’s picture plays using organic metaphors of film history see Ramsaye, T. () A Million and One Nights; a History of the Motion Picture, Simon and Schuster, New York, pp. 91–103. There are no documents that specifically detail Black’s relations with Edison during this demonstration, but his position at the institute makes it a safe assumption. I would like to thank Carl and Annetta Black who have worked diligently to preserve and catalogue their family archive. Their generosity and willingness to discuss this material has made this project possible. By 1897 Alfred Stieglitz, happy that the hand camera fad was coming to a close, was eager to promote the advantages of the hand camera for making art. This reference to the well‐known line Robert Burns’s line from ‘To a Louse’ was a nod to Black’s Scottish cultural heritage. I am indebted here to James Lastra’s work on the material basis of diegesis. See Lastra, J. (1997) ‘From the captured moment to the cinematic image: a transformation in pictorial order’, in The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, ed. D. Andrew, University of Texas Press, Austin. Phillip Prodger has argued for considering instantaneous photography as a coherent ‘vernacular movement – a grassroots upheaval, organized around a singular wish: to freeze motion in time’. From his broad archive, Prodger notes that street scenes and marine views were the main categories of instantaneous photograph until Eadweard Muybridge made the photography of bodies in motion a famous subject. From a handbill in the Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library. A picture of a woman sitting at the side of the street crying accompanied some of the publicity material. From a poster in the Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library. For a discussion of the relation between illustration and dramatic picturing, see Meisel, M. (1983) Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth‐Century England, Princeton University Press, Princeton. ‘It was a capital audience to show pictures to, for they were prompt to notice and commend attractive compositions, felicitous or characteristic groupings, [and] forcible light and shade’, The Brooklyn Eagle, 6 May, 1890, p. 6. For an extension into film theory of Galassi’s claim, see Aumont, J. (1989) L’oeil Interminable : Cinéma Et Peinture, Librarie Séguier, Paris. From a handbill from the Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library. This painting is also known as The Fairman Rogers Four‐in‐Hand. This inevitability of certain pictured instants was often used for dramatic effect. Augustus Egg, in his well‐known Past and Present (1858), uses the instantaneous effect of a falling house of cards for heavy symbolism. I refer to it as Black’s picture in the tradition of attributing authorship to the lecturer. The actual photographer of this picture is J. S. Johnston. Since Black used it for the covers of multiple handbills, he obviously saw it as representative. ‘In the first photograph, I was shown at the very moment of entering the water, and my face reflected all too clearly the sensation of the first contact with the cold sea‐water. Really, one would not approach a lady with such gestures in the shore’, 1886, quoted in Gunning, T. (1999) ‘Embarrassing evidence: the detective camera and the documentary impulse’, in Collecting Visible Evidence, eds J. Gaines & R. M. Gaines, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p. 57. Francois Delsarte, mostly through his Anglophone disciple Genevieve Stebbins, was highly influential in connecting acting styles and the athletic physical culture of the nineteenth century. See Delaumosne A. J. Arnauld, A. J. Delsarte, F. J. Géraldyim. (1887) Delsarte System of Oratory, 3rd edn, E. S. Werner, New York; Stebbins, G. (1886) Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression, E. S. Werner, New York. The early instances of Swedish and German acrobats engaged in ‘fancy diving’ at the turn of the nineteenth century coincides with the development of actors presenting their bodies as sets of posed pictures for an audience. The sport gained a new popularity right at the time that the diver became a subject of instantaneous photography. The first modern diving competitions were held in England in the 1880s, and the sport became an Olympic event in 1904 (Rackham, G. (1975) Diving Complete, Faber and Faber Ltd., NewYork). For a discussion of tableau vivant culture and Eakins’ Arcadian works see Foster, K. A. & Bockrath, M. (1997) Thomas Eakins Rediscovered: Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Yale University Press, New Haven. His interest in the juxtaposition of recognisably modern nude bodies and Arcadian settings cost him his commission and eventually his position at the academy in 1886, an unfortunate event that Black laments in his autobiography. The photographic modernity of the painting was noted in the first reviews of the painting. See ‘At the private view, first impression of the Autumn Exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts’, Philadelphia Times, 1885, p. 2. From a handbill from the Billy Rose Theater collection of the New York Public Library. ‘The whisper began in the clutter of pictures which I had been displaying with the screen talks. When I found parallels and sequences not only in action, but in likeness, when the bit of story in one snapshot began to join quite naturally with the bit of story in another snapshot of differing origin, the whisper became a shout. Why not use a chosen group of people in a variety of situations?’ (Black , p. 129).