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Kiss kiss, click click

Print | Comments () Posted by Mark Feeney February 7, 2011 09:10 PM

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There are three photographers who stand alone in film history. The first two are Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. Their experiments in the 1870s and '80s with capturing action through sequential images helped lead in the 1890s to what we now know as the motion picture (note the adjective).

Muybridge's best-known multiple images show horses galloping (above), men running and jumping, birds flying. They're gathered in the 11 volumes of his "Animal Locomotion" series. Many of these photographs can be viewed online. On Valentine's Day, another Muybridge site debuts, the Eadweard Muybridge Online Archive. The archive will bring together and make available thousands of Muybridge images. Among the sequences will be "The Kiss," which shows two nude women chastely doing just that. David Gordon, an artist who teaches at North Shore Community College, created and curates the site. For its debut, he's made a short film loop of the two women kissing. The images, unanimated, can be seen here.

Gordon credits the assistance of the Boston Public Library Rare Books Department in setting up the site.

Oh. The third photographer? That would be Stanley Kubrick, who before becoming a film director was a photojournalist, and quite a good one, for Look magazine. Not to get carried away with the osculatory theme, but his second feature was "Killer's Kiss." And, come to think of it, galloping horses certainly do figure in "The Killing." That's Kubrick, below, during his Look days, in a self-portrait with his Leica.