Collection FW2006: Séquences

I recently saw a report on Eadweard J. Muybridge, a pioneer photographer whose story is as fascinating as the invention that his name is most associated with - a technique he developed to capture animal locomotion, out of a popularly-debated question of the day back in 1872: whether all four of a horse's hooves left the ground at the same time during a gallop. 

In 1877, Muybridge settled the question with a single photographic negative showing Stanford's racehorse Occident airborne in the midst of a gallop.  This negative was lost, but it survives through woodcuts made at the time.  By 1878, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion.

This series of photos taken in Palo Alto, California, is called "Sallie Gardner at a Gallop" or "The Horse in Motion" and shows that the hooves do all leave the ground — although not with the legs fully extended forward and back, as contemporary illustrators tended to imagine, but rather at the moment when all the hooves are tucked under the horse as it switches from "pulling" with the front legs to "pushing" with the back legs.

This scarf design is not particularly beautiful, but memorable for the tribute it pays to a discovery of our modern age.  When knotted, the scarf appears quite traditional in both colours and pattern.  The white background, however, renders it a classic though.