The Horse in Motion is a series of cabinet cards by Eadweard Muybridge, including six cards that each show a sequential series of six to twelve “automatic electro-photographs” depicting the movement of a horse. Muybridge shot the photographs in June 1878. An additional card reprinted the single image of the horse “Occident” trotting at high speed, which had previously been published by Muybridge in 1877.
The series became the first example of chronophotography, an early method to photographically record the passing of time, mainly used to document the different phases of locomotion for scientific study. It formed an important step in the development of motion pictures. One of the cards (often retitled Sallie Gardner at a Gallop). has even been hailed as “the world’s first bit of cinema”.
The photographs showed that all four feet are sometimes simultaneously off the ground and that when galloping this occurs when the feet are “gathered” beneath the body, not when the fore and hindlimbs are “extended” as sometimes depicted in older paintings.
Muybridge made several series of different horses performing several gaits over the next week. He had 6 different 22 × 14 cm cards printed by Morse’s gallery and registered them for copyright at the Library of Congress on 15 July 1878.
Eadweard J. Muybridge (pronounced /ˌɛdwərd ˈmaɪbrɪdʒ/; 9 April 1830 — 8 May 1904) was an English photographer who spent much of his life in the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip.
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