Museum photography exhibits most commonly focus on art and journalism, but a new exhibit at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich puts the spotlight on three photographers who used photography to further scientific knowledge.
Each is credited, alongside photography work, with inventing devices to help use photography for this purpose and each is acclaimed as having elevated scientific photography to the level of art.
Eadweard Muybridge is legendary for his “animal locomotion” series of photos, which show humans and other animals in repeated series as they engage in physical activity. He is credited with proving that all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground while it is running, and with inspiring Marcel Duchamp’s legendary “Nude Descending a Staircase” and other artworks. The exhibit features several of Muybridge’s locomotion series: a man with a baseball bat and dumbbells, a woman with a tennis racket, a deer running, a pigeon flying, a baby walking. A fun addition to the exhibit is two zoetropes — early precursors to movies — using Muybridge images of a baby and a horse to create moving pictures.
Harold Edgerton invented the stroboscope, a lamp that could appear to freeze motion with rapid pulses of intense light. He used it to create a series of ultra high-speed, stop-motion photos: a football being kicked, a golf drive, a tennis stroke, rodeo riders, a pole vaulter. His “milk drop” photo is his most famous, showing a droplet landing on a blood-red surface and forming a tiny crown. He studied the impact of bullets on objects by shooting a jack of diamonds and an apple and recording the bullets in flight, suspended as if motionless.
Berenice Abbott wanted to use photography to record the laws of physics and chemistry. Her extraordinary photographs show magnetic fields, beams of light filtered through glass, collisions of balls and soap bubbles. Abbott succeeded spectacularly in her field — she was the photography editor for Science Illustrated magazine and worked at MIT — despite sexist roadblocks thrown up by others, not all of them men. She said once, “When I wanted to do a book on electricity, most scientists insisted it couldn’t be done. When I finally found a collaborator, his wife objected to his working with a woman.”
SCIENCE IN MOTION: THE PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIES OF EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, HAROLD EDGERTON AND BERENICE ABBOTT is at Bruce Museum, One Museum Drive in Greenwich, until Oct. 16. The exhibit is organized by Bank of America Corp. brucemuseum.org.
