Before I begin, I should probably caution you, the reader, that I am a bit of a nineteenth-century photography fanatic, and thus may appear a bit biased. Biases aside, I thought the exhibition Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change was nothing short of a triumph. It was thoughtfully laid out sequentially and the selection was extraordinary. Plus, the lighting was sufficient enough to view the prints without causing any serious amount of damage to them: the guards were extra vigilant to make sure people did not take photos of the prints (ironically antique prints such as these are extremely sensitive to light, and any digital-photography could seriously harm them).
Large scale landscape prints of California’s light-houses and Yosemite Valley were grouped beside miniature stereotypes of San Francisco’s city life (for those of you who are wondering, a stereotype is a nineteenth-century invention whereby nearly duplicate images are taken of a single scene, so when viewed through a stereoscope the image appears in 3D). Visitors and San Francisco residents alike I am sure will enjoy the images of early San Francisco in its post Gold Rush heyday. These images are quite small, and glasses are provided, however I could never manage to get them to work properly.
However, I must confess it was the mammoth prints of Yosemite that were my particular favorite. Those images of Yosemite’s mountains and waterfalls, with their paradoxical capturing of stillness and activity, are profoundly beautiful and quite simply breath-taking. You know, most people can no longer appreciate the effort involved in capturing these images. To enlarge an image was virtually impossible, and as a result one had to print the negative on a glass plate the size you wanted the image to be, and therefore haul around a camera that could hold a 17 x 22 inch plate. Throw in the delicate and rather physically hazardous chemical process that had to be completed immediately in order to develop the prints, and their successful production is all the more overwhelming in my opinion.
Then of course, there are the galleries devoted to Muybridge’s work on the animal in locomotion, the work that he is really known for, and quite rightly, for his pioneering work in stop action photography and moving pictures predated the invention of perforated film strips and motion pictures. The SFMOMA has collected a huge selection of drafts and published examples from Muybridge’s famous series Animal Locomotion. These images, for all that they were originally intended as scientific documentation of motion and movement, betray an artistic sensibility and in many cases a sense of pathos and human frailty that one often detects in documentary photography of this period, but is appreciated all the same.
What else can I say? If you do not see this exhibition before it closes on June 7th, you are denying yourself the experience of a truly masterful exhibit that will astound and amaze. Go see Helios before he is whisked away in his winged chariot.
Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change is on view at the SFMOMA on 3rd and Mission until June 7th, 2011.
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