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The observational gaze froze an entity into one moment in time, so offering new perspectives on the relationship between entity/body and action/movement. (This also suggested that the images might be played back at the same speed at which they were taken, and Muybridge may be credited as an inventor of cinema.)

So, what to make of the meaning of photographic meaning, its revelations as well as its occlusions? Here are two theories of the photograph, utterly opposed but both true. First, Kaja Silverman:

“Photography … shows us that there really is a world, that it wants to be seen by us, and that it exceeds our capacity to know it.” She quotes Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass: “A vast similitude interlocks all/ All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, … / All distances of place however wide,/ All distances of time, all inanimate forms … ”¹⁷⁷ Photography suggests verisimilitude. It records light and space in one place, and presents its findings in another. Like text, it transports meaning across time and space. A photograph’s meanings are intelligible for their recognizability from similarities in the experience of the viewer, and informative for their unsettling, disruptive dissimilarities.

“Photography,” Silverman goes on to say, undermines Descartes’ notion of the cogito, which placed man the meaning-maker at the relational center of the universe. There are photographers and viewers of photographs, for sure, but photography is also a medium through which the world presents itself to us, “demonstrating that it exists … an ontological calling card.”¹⁷⁸

Photography shatters any illusion that the meaning self is the center of the world. Rather, photography transposes the meaning self with others – the other of the photographer, and the others in the image who could well be, or have been, self.

Now a second theory, of Jean Baudrillard, railing against “this confusion, this diabolical seduction of images. Above all, it is the reference principle of images …, this strategy by means of which they always appear to refer to a real world, to real objects, and to reproduce something which is logically and chronologically anterior to themselves. None of this is true.” Images tell tales; they deceive; they manipulate. Photographers are guilty and viewers are innocently led astray by this “telescoping of images into reality,” this “collusion between images and life.”¹⁷⁹

Both theories capture the affordances of images, their contradictory truths.

Benjamin: “No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject … the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search … a picture of the tiny spark of contingency … to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment in the future nest so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”¹⁸⁰

So, we encounter two truths in complicated play, the truths of recorded reality (spaces, bodies, objects), and the truths of always-transposing agency between self, other, and thing.

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¹⁷⁶ Rebecca Solnit, 2003a, Motion Studies: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, London, UK: Bloomsbury; Rebecca Solnit, 2003b, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, New York, NY: Viking; Philip Brookman, 2010, Helios: Eedweard Muybridge in a Time of Change, Göttingen, Germany: Steidl/Corcoran Gallery of Art; Brian Clegg, 2007, “The Man Who Stopped Time,” Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

¹⁷⁷ Kaja Silverman, 2015, The Miracle of Analogy, or the History of Photography, Part 1, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 11.

¹⁷⁸ Ibid., pp. 10–11, 1.

¹⁷⁹ Jean Baudrillard, 1984, The Evil Demon of Images, translated by P. Patton and P. Foss, Sydney, Australia: Power Institute Publications, pp. 13, 25–26.

¹⁸⁰ Walter Benjamin, 1931 [1999], “Little History of Photography,” pp. 507–30 in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, edited by M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 510.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 235–237. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Eadweard Muybridge’s Images of Movement §MS2.2.3a