Eadweard Muybridge

I've been familiar with Muybridge's name because of the vital importance of his experiments in motion photography to the invention of cinema, but I'd never realized he was also a famous landscape photographer. The examples on show often exude that oddly ethereal quality of 19th century photographs, a happy byproduct of the technical processes involved. Water in particular looks very different: waterfalls are bizarrely solid and bright, and it's difficult to tell whether that's surf or sea mist at the base of cliffs. Nevertheless, the photos of Yosemite in particular are beautiful, but equally impressive are the multiple-plate panoramas of San Francisco, a real glimpse into another era as the vast majority of the buildings were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. The second part of the exhibition contains the work for which he is now most well-known. In addition to the groundbreaking sequences of horses in motion, there are animals of every sort: elephants, buffalo, pigs and even eagles, as well as humans carrying out various activities (though one suspects the naked ladies have considerably less scientific value than claimed ...) Simply looking at the sheets of prints is like examining a filmstrip frame by frame, and the projected recreation of images from the zoopraxiscope is akin to primitive animation. Motion pictures really were only a few years away.