The Mechanical against Objectivity

Throughout his 1887 photographic atlas, Animal Locomotion, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge uses the serial, instantaneous imagery of chronophotography – a medium typically associated with the automated mechanisms of industrial productivity and scientific analysis – against the economies for which it was developed. This article aims to identify a subcategory of works in the series termed ‘inoperative images’, meaning photographs that both depict non-productive gestures – such as dancing, posing and lying down – as well as those sequences that, thanks to mechanical failures, inconsistent time intervals or the rearrangement of plates, ultimately proved useless for physiological analysis. Where previous scholars have attributed Muybridge’s lack of rigorously applied scientific method to a desire for an aesthetic product, these inoperative images may also be understood as creative resistance to the mechanisation and industrialisation of photographic labour in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In this context, a different understanding of Animal Locomotion as an anti-industrial document comes to light, one that illustrates how the mechanical may work against the goals of purpose-driven, standardised time and objectivity

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