Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change

last updated 8 January 2015

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Through June 7

Photography exhibits that spread across multiple rooms can make your eyes glaze over, said Keith Bowers in SF Weekly. “No matter how good the work is, there’s a possibility of the viewer ‘going blind’ and losing interest.” Not so with SFMOMA’s “fascinating” Eadweard Muybridge retrospective, a three-prong tour de force with enough flair to make viewers “double back” for a second look. A landscape photographer whose work influenced fellow West Coast lensman Ansel Adams, Muybridge (1830–1904) is best known for his “stop-motion photographs,” an invention he dreamed up when railroad magnate Leland Stanford hired him to settle a bet. Outfitting a racetrack with two dozen cameras connected to trip wires, Muybridge proved that trotting horses at times have all four hooves off the ground. Stanford won the wager, and a precursor to motion pictures was born.

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But Muybridge’s true genius lay elsewhere, said Jennifer Modenessi in the Contra Costa, Calif., Times. Distracted by “wildly innovative sequential images of galloping horses, graceful dancing women, and acrobatic men,” most curators gloss over Muybridge’s cityscapes and landscapes, which capture, in all their “breathtaking” glory, the “natural splendors of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, the broad avenues of early San Francisco, and Northern California’s lighthouses and rocky, rolling coast.” Thankfully, this show gets it right. The “lushest” images here come from an 1870s trip Muybridge took to Central America soon after he was acquitted of murdering his wife’s lover. There, “he took melancholy, painterly photographs of ruined churches, his troubled psyche seeking some kind of spiritual refuge, perhaps.” Indeed, these pictures are so gorgeous and haunting, “I’d love to wander through an exhibition devoted solely to them.”