MOTION PICTURES : In Eadweard Muybridge’s Photos, Actions Are Broken Down Into Dozens of Separate Gestures

Nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, an English merchant’s son who immigrated to the United States at age 21, is famous for three things: his own bizarre spelling of his name, his sensational acquittal for the murder of his wife’s lover, and his blurry but indisputable photographic proof that Occident, former California Gov. Leland Stanford’s racehorse, galloped by lifting all four feet off the ground.

In 1877, Muybridge began pursuing a serious study of animal motion with the help of a special contraption. When Occident streaked across a specially prepared track, the horse successively tripped wires attached to 24 still cameras, 21 inches apart. For the first time, years before movies were invented, motion had been systematically “stopped” for the world to see.

Muybridge went on to study the movements of other animals, and of men and women. Published in “The Attitudes of Animals in Motion” (1881) and “Animal Locomotion” (1887), his sequences of views broke down the separate gestures of bodies doing such familiar things as walking, running and climbing, as well as sports activities (gymnastics, boxing, pole-vaulting, baseball) and manual labor (wielding a pickax).

Even in our sophisticated world of laser discs and satellite transmission, these images retain their curiously mesmerizing quality.

The repetition of almost-identical white imagery on flat black backgrounds has a rhythmic, almost trance-like effect. The images themselves allow viewers to marvel once again at the remarkable piece of engineering that is the human body. They also show how paying close attention to tiny increments of time can make even the most ordinary gesture seem fascinating. “Motion and Document--Sequence and Time: Eadweard Muybridge and Contemporary American Photography”--yes, the title is a drag, but the show is enthralling--finally has made its way across the country to the Long Beach Museum of Art, where it remains through Sept. 13.

Organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., the exhibit combines Muybridge’s grids of stop-motion imagery with multi-image photographs by modern and contemporary artists who found the grid format a useful way of demonstrating the relationship of parts to a whole.

Last summer, when the exhibit was at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, it became the target of censorship when museum director Elizabeth Broun removed a contemporary work by Sol LeWitt, a “peephole” sequence of increasingly intimate shots of a female nude walking toward the viewer. Broun maintained that it was offensive to women. (She eventually put the work back into the show, and it is on view in Long Beach).

There is a lot of nudity in this show, as it happens, but most of it is the work of Muybridge himself. Many of his models, both male and female, go about their business in the altogether. Stripped down to skin, they have a non-specific, archetypal quality akin to artists’ models posing in the studio.

Still, it does seem that Muybridge posed the nude women in some particularly awkward or playfully anecdotal activities: climbing in and out of a hammock; drop-kicking a hat; putting on a dress (with none of the usual undergarments); walking on a row of rocks carrying a fishing reel and basket; giving another woman a bath with a bucket of water. Seen a century later, these images have as much to do with cultural beliefs about sexual roles as they do with scientific analysis of movement.

Muybridge had to depend on his own rather cumbersome invention, the zoopraxiscope, to give his images the effect of movement. But we have a graceful tool, devised by documentary filmmaker James Sheldon (co-curator of the exhibit, with Jock Sturges). Sheldon’s videodisc effortlessly animates Muybridge’s photographs, making them seem like snippets from a medley of old silent movies. An interactive component of the exhibit allows viewers to isolate and combine elements from the enormous stockpile of images.

Sprinkled throughout the exhibit are examples of work by more than 40 famous and little-known photographers who have adapted Muybridge’s sequential approach. Some focus on a single object, place or person over a period of years; others document briefer intervals (the speediest is a bullet’s trajectory through a balloon, in a photo sequence shot by Harold Edgerton in 1959). Still other photographers have made critiques or spoofs of Muybridge’s work.

William Christenberry returned to a stretch of country road in Greensboro, Ala., every year between 1967 and 1990 to document the evolution of a decrepit little store into a modest establishment called the Underground Night Club. Each new identity that the shack assumes--with the help of additions, fresh paint and various hand-painted and printed signs--mirrors a broader cultural shift from rural Southern life to more standardized suburbia.

Nicholas Nixon chose one photograph of his wife and her three sisters from each year between 1975 and 1990 for a grid of group portraits tracking the almost imperceptible signs of aging. Perhaps because all the women wear basic sports clothes and have simple hairdos, there are few outward signs of changes in fashion over the years. This helps give the images the slow-moving quality of life as it is lived , rather than the rapidly dated look of snapshots.

In “Borrowed Time, Variation II” from 1983, Jake Seniuk constructs an archetypal portrait of freeway drivers and their front-seat passengers. His grid of 54 rectangular views through the windshields of cars seen on Seattle freeways over several days reveals a gray universe of anonymous people sipping beverages, lecturing each other, listening, smoking, reading, or simply looking worried or bored or angry.

In an untitled New York City street sequence from 1938, Helen Levitt tells a story that may have lasted all of 10 minutes: A woman sitting on a stoop observes a man, probably a drunk, reclining in an upturned baby carriage. She turns her head away, but another woman steps up, lectures him and calls over to a group of men. One fellow comes to help her get him out of the carriage, but the man never budges. The last shot shows him victoriously smiling out at the camera.

Ralph Steiner’s five-part “Laundry Series” is about as close as photography comes to poetry. When the wind is still, the bedsheets hang in a row of deeply curved folds, looking as though they might have come from the wardrobe of an ancient Greek statue. When the wind blows, Steiner steps to the side, and the sheets are transformed into a tangle of broad ribbons flung into the sky.

Contemporary artist Kathy Grove attempts to address Muybridge’s sometimes curious use of female subjects with “The Other Series, After Muybridge.” She re-photographs Muybridge’s images of a nude woman putting on a dress and turning around, but erases the woman. All that remains is the mysterious image of a bunched-up dress flipping around in space.

Among the Muybridge spoofs, William Wegman’s “Untitled (Fay Running, after Muybridge)” is probably the funniest. In a series of four shots, the contemporary photographer poses his Weimaraner lying on her side with her legs alternately extended and drawn inward, imitating one of the racehorses in Muybridge’s portfolio.

Of course, Fay’s baleful look at the camera in the second shot deliberately breaks with a central convention of Muybridge’s work: that he is watching a moving subject who acts “naturally” and is unaware of his presence. Nowadays, many artists find photographic images useful not so much as truthful documents of real life but as a highly self-conscious means of analyzing the way we mentally process imagery.

Yet Muybridge’s brilliantly simple photo-sequences still exert a powerful fascination for casual viewers and specialists alike. The exhibit invites a long and patient browse through a world of stopped motion that is at once a century old and as current as the next move you make.

What: “Motion and Document--Sequence and Time: Eadweard Muybridge and Contemporary American Photography.”

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, and 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays only, through Sept. 13.

Where: Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd, Long Beach.

Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to the Seventh Street exit; go left onto Cherry Avenue and left again at Ocean Boulevard.

Wherewithal: Adults $2, children under 12 free.

Where to call: (310) 439-2119.