The Horse in Motion

A sequence of photographs made by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 showing a galloping horse with all four hooves off the ground during part of its stride.

Zoopraxiscope: A device that projected painted images from a rotating glass disk to create an illusion of motion. Muybridge later used this projector to present motion studies as moving images.
Leland Stanford: An American railroad magnate, politician, and horse breeder who served as California governor and U.S. senator. Stanford funded the experiment to settle a dispute about a galloping horse’s stride.
Animal locomotion: The study of how animals move through coordinated patterns of body and limb motion. The photographs made animal movement available for frame-by-frame analysis.
Galloping horse in art: A longstanding artistic subject often depicted with the horse’s legs extended in a pose unlike its actual airborne phase. Earlier paintings commonly showed a gallop position that the photographs disproved.
Photographic shutter: A mechanism that controls how long light reaches a camera’s photosensitive surface. Brief exposures helped freeze each phase of the horse’s gallop.
Eadweard Muybridge: A British-born photographer known for sequential photographs of animals and people in motion. He designed and made the 1878 horse photographs.
Muybridge's Animal Locomotion: A multi-volume publication presenting photographic studies of humans and animals in motion. The horse sequence anticipated Muybridge’s larger published motion-study project.
Stroboscopic photography: A technique that uses brief flashes of light to record multiple positions of moving objects. It offered another way to isolate motion phases without Muybridge’s camera array.
Chronophotography: A photographic technique that records successive phases of movement in a sequence. Muybridge’s plates are an influential instance of this motion-recording method.
Occident (horse): A racehorse owned by Leland Stanford that appeared in Muybridge’s early motion-photography experiments. Muybridge first tested the photographic setup on Stanford’s horse Occident.

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