Muybridge and Mobility 9780520382442

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Muybridge and Mobility

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defining moments in photography Anthony W. Lee, Editor In focused case studies, this series redefines key works in photography’s rich global history by introducing new points of view and juxtaposing different voices from across disciplines. 1. On Alexander Gardner’s “Photographic Sketch Book” of the Civil War, by Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young 2. Lynching Photographs, by Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee 3. Weegee and “Naked City,” by Anthony W. Lee and Richard Meyer 4. “Th e Steerage” and Alfred Stieglitz, by Jason Francisco and Elizabeth Anne McCauley, with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee 5. Trauma and Documentary Photography of the FSA, by Sara Blair and Eric Rosenberg, with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee 6. Muybridge and Mobility, by Tim Cresswell and John Ott, with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee

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Muybridge and Mobility

t i m c r e s s w e l l a n d joh n o t t

u n i v ersi t y of c a l ifor n i a pr ess

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2022 by Tim Cresswell, John Ott, and Anthony W. Lee Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on fi le at the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-520-38242-8 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-38243-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-38244-2 (ebook) Manufactured in the United States of America

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con ten ts

Introduction 1 Anthony W. Lee Visualizing Mobility

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Tim Cresswell Race and Mobility 53 John Ott Notes 107 Index

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Introduction anthony w. lee

In the summer of 1878 in a small town just south of San Francisco, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge produced the first series of instantaneous photographs ever made of a horse’s movement through space and time. With an ingenious arrangement—a battery of a dozen cameras lined up at evenly spaced intervals, spring shutters on each camera, and trip wires connecting the shutters to the ground of a racetrack—he was able to capture a champion trotter moving across a gridded and numbered background (see figure 1). Ever the showman, he invited journalists to witness and marvel at the event and also to ensure that there was no sleight of hand in the proceedings. Muybridge had been working on and off at the project since 1872 under the patronage of Leland Stanford, the immensely wealthy railroad magnate, real estate developer, politician, and horse breeder.1 Stanford hypothesized that his horse engaged in “unsupported transit,” by which he meant that all four hooves left the ground entirely for a split second over the course of each stride, and called upon Muybridge to prove the case with his camera. What began as a modest experiment to fulfill a wealthy patron’s curiosity—it’s possible that the photographer proved Stanford’s hunch soon after he began the project—eventually transformed into something much more: a sophisticated and unprecedented decades-long inquiry into the visualization of

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animal locomotion, what today is familiarly called early photography’s “motion studies.” Muybridge understood the importance of his work; so, too, did those who witnessed it. “There is a feeling of awe in the mind of the beholder,” one of the invited journalists wrote upon seeing the trotter in flight, “he sees the miniature of the flying horse so perfect that it startles him.”2 A radically new kind of experience of seeing, analyzing, and representing motion in the world, no longer tied to casual human vision and its commonsensical judgments, was being unleashed by the serial cameras. But the implications went further. With these pictures, not just movement but time and space, as they were previously visualized and calculated, were “annihilated.”3 Muybridge’s contemporaries used the word deliberately, insisting on the violence to inherited forms of knowledge they were observing being obliterated. From that summer onward, Muybridge gave up almost every other part of his studio practice—the many landscape projects on Yosemite and other regions of the American West, and the majestic cityscapes and panoramas of San Francisco that had initially brought him fame—and devoted the rest of his long life to the pursuit of making and publishing motion photography. He continued to refine his techniques, catching ever more minute intervals of time and quirky movements through space, and found innovative ways to display and publicize his work. He also expanded his subjects. Horses became bison, camels, cats, cows, deer, dogs, elephants, goats, lions, monkeys, ostriches, pigs, racoons, women and men (both clothed and unclothed): an entire Noah’s ark of creatures. The movements, too, became more eccentric, and whereas Stanford’s trotter galloping at a consistent speed across a racetrack could be photographed in one manner, other animals, whose movements were more erratic, arrhythmic, or unpredictable, required other solutions. At the University of Pennsylvania, where Muybridge continued his experiments, birds took thrashing flight, mules suddenly kicked, fencers rattled sabers, women leaped over stools, men threw balls, baseball players

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swung bats, track athletes pole-vaulted and hurdled. Ladies kissed, curtsied, swung parasols, took baths, stood up, lay down, ran away, hopped, skipped, and danced. Boys leapfrogged, somersaulted, and sprinted. Men wrestled, boxed, clambered up stairs, swung hammers and heaved pickaxes, see-sawed into handstands. One even shared swigs of a bottle with a donkey. In all, Muybridge made more than twenty thousand pictures. He published his findings as cabinet cards, lantern slides, cyanotypes, and collotypes; and most famously, he collected and organized his pictures in four separate volumes: Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881), Animal Locomotion (1887), Animals in Motion (1899), and The Human Figure in Motion (1901). Dover Books reprinted Animal Locomotion as a three-volume set in 1979; versions have been in print ever since. These photographs and books, along with the many cognate projects undertaken by those photographers Muybridge influenced, ensured that motion studies became part of a culture’s commonplace understanding of movement itself—how it happens, can be visualized, interrogated, represented, and displayed. Combined with today’s film and video, in which motion studies have become “motion pictures,” it’s not so farfetched to say that we regularly see and experience the world in the ways Muybridge first presented to us. Indeed, there’s a case to be made that we spend our daily lives in his universe. So what kind of universe did he reveal? This book takes up the challenge of answering this question and is devoted to re-examining the defining feature of Muybridge’s practice, his motion studies. It is co-written by Tim Cresswell, a cultural geographer, and John Ott, an art historian, who approach Muybridge’s project from different disciplinary perspectives. They agree, however, in shifting the fundamental terms normally used to describe the photographer’s work, preferring to see “motion” as part of a much more encompassing concept, “mobility.” On the one hand, “motion” has usually been understood as an action or process of movement, a changing of place or position in space. It addresses the

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mechanics of that change, of objects or bodies progressing through space and across time, all of which, as Muybridge demonstrated, can be measured and quantified. On the other hand, “mobility” refers to a much larger set of cultural and social understandings, in which motion is not only measured but also interpreted, experienced, and construed as part of a wider network of meanings. Consider, for example, the familiar phrase “upward mobility,” meant to describe movement in a social register, and carrying an enormous load of cultural and political implications. As Tim Cresswell defines it in his essay, mobility is movement plus meaning plus power. The advantages of recasting motion studies as part of mobility are many. Among other things, these essays suggest that Muybridge’s experiments were part of a much larger historical transformation in which certain forms of motion were given significance and accrued value. Cultural geographer and art historian agree that such an emphasis allows us to see Muybridge’s work as belonging to structures of power. They differ, however, in identifying the kinds of structures, the particular values given to motion, and the transformation of its meanings over time. Tim Cresswell proposes seeing Muybridge’s work as an integral part of a “constellation of mobility,” in which the experiments with the camera belonged to the same annihilation of conventional space and time as wrought by the advent of rail and steam power, telecommunications, the mechanization of labor, the disciplining of working bodies, and much more. He looks carefully at features like Muybridge’s grid—and the relationship between horse and grid—and understands them as part of an emergent and radically new paradigm in “cultures of mobility” and information that are still with us. John Ott suggests that Muybridge’s photographs reveal instead a modern world structured around racial difference, and sees the photographer’s project from the point of view of critical race studies. Muybridge’s choice to use unclothed, white bodies as his default subjects already borrowed from much larger social assumptions about the kinds of figures who were at liberty to move and engage in expres-

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sive practices. What happens, he asks, when we focus on those socially marginal figures—black boxers and jockeys—who also made up a distinct subject matter before the camera? What forms of social mobility can we identify in them? The two authors also differ in terms of how they understand the study of photographs more broadly. One sees photographs as intervening in knowledge and experience; the other as opportunities to investigate how race and all forms of visual culture, including photography, are not merely adjacent categories but in fact mutually constituted. One understands them as enabling prevailing ideologies, including some frightening prospects for the present; the other, reminding us of photography’s collaborative nature, as subtly undermining them. The essays make for a lively, interdisciplinary exchange. Although both authors eschew biographical interpretations of Muybridge’s work, perhaps, by way of introduction, we would do well to recognize that the photographer was himself a mobile actor and partook of his era’s many invitations simply to move and become a migrant.4 Born in 1830 just outside central London, as a young man Muybridge quickly took advantage of the expansive opportunities made possible by commercial steamship travel and Victorian England’s global reach. He resettled in the United States, first in New York around 1850, New Orleans in 1855, and then later that year in San Francisco. He began a professional life as a book and prints dealer and turned to photography only in 1866, when he was thirty-six years old. Wanderlust would never leave him, and despite all the many difficulties early photography’s heavy equipment posed, the camera allowed him to travel and relocate throughout his life: up the Pacific coast to Oregon, Washington, and Alaska; along the Central American corridor from Panama to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico; back to the east coast in and around Philadelphia; and eventually home to London, where he died in Kingston in 1904. His government and corporate commissions and individual inquisitiveness took him to places where few white

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men generally traveled, including the many Native American lands that made up the American west, volcanoes in Guatemala, coffee fincas in the Nicaraguan highlands, mountainous guano heaps in the Farallones. Even when momentarily settled, he changed business addresses frequently, restlessly. In San Francisco, where most professional photographers competed vigorously with each other, struggled to establish a consistent clientele, and tried mightily to keep a steady location, Muybridge moved studios constantly. In 1866, he opened shop at 415 Montgomery Street, the trendiest commercial strip in town, but two years later, he moved further south to 138 Montgomery. A year later he was at 121, two years after that at 12, then 6, then in 1873, around the time of his initial work with Stanford, back north to 429; a year later, to Fourth Street, two years later to Pine Street. He changed photography partners almost as frequently, and home addresses came and went, too: Oakland, San Jose, the fashionable south of Market neighborhood in San Francisco, for a time in Sacramento, then down the peninsula to Palo Alto. On the road during photographic expeditions, he traveled in a covered wagon with “Helios’ Flying Studio” scrawled across its side. Helios, the sun god in Greek mythology, was a common name taken up by enterprising photographers to emphasize their craft as being enabled by daylight and as a medium of illumination in itself. But the “flying studio,” more unique to Muybridge, might be said to properly characterize the swooping and soaring quality of his travels. The man seemed everywhere. The photographer changed his name nearly as often. Born Edward James Muggeridge, he became in 1856 Edward Muygridge, in 1867 Edward Muybridge, in 1875 Eduardo Santiago, and finally in 1882 Eadweard Muybridge.5 His cousin thought he changed his name from Muggeridge to Muygridge because it sounded more pleasing. Others suggest that Muybridge was partaking of the free-living, free-wheeling environment of the far western reaches of the country, where men and women could leave their pasts behind and remake themselves over and over again. But we are also in a

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position to say that living a fundamentally nomadic and transnational life, crossing and recrossing both physical borders and cultural boundaries, allowed the man to take on whichever set of identities he might need to address the opportunities and demands of the moment. Being in perpetual motion, Muybridge quickly learned that the freedoms from convention and possibilities for renewal and self-invention were myriad. Motion, movement, locomotion, and even migration—these are familiar terms in the study of Muybridge’s work. This book is devoted to introducing, emphasizing, and exploring the fundamental significance of one more.

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Visualizing Mobility tim cresswell

This (figure 1) is a series of photographs taken in quick succession by Eadweard Muybridge at the ranch of Leland Stanford in Palo Alto in 1878. It was a photo very like one in this sequence that caused quite a stir in the local and then national media in the weeks and months following its release. It made Muybridge internationally famous. In this essay my purpose is to use concepts derived from mobility studies to link the details of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of horses taken around 1878 to wider transformations in cultures of mobility both at the time, and more recently. Unlike John Ott, I am not a historian, but a cultural geographer, and my primary interests are in the ways geographical concepts such as space and mobility play active roles in the constitution of culture and society. I am using Muybridge’s images as entry points for speculation about mobility in ways that transcend the specific time and place of their production, and this essay is therefore quite different from Ott’s careful excavation of race in the specific place and time of Philadelphia at the end of the nineteenth century. Muybridge’s sequence of photos of a horse is something to think with. It throws light on our understandings of a key theme of modern life—mobility. It is also an image which is illuminated by contemporary mobility theory.

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Figure 1.  Eadweard Muybridge, “The Horse in Motion. ‘Abe Edgington,’ owned by Leland Stanford; driven by C. Marvin, trotting at a 2:24 gait over the Palo Alto track, 15th June 1878.” Albumen silver print, 11 × 22 cm (4 × 8 ⅛ in.). Photo: LC-DIG-ppmsca-05952, Library of Congress.

My interpretation of Muybridge’s images intentionally connects two seemingly distinct ways of interpreting an image—one which is focused on the details of the image and one that understands an image in its wider context. Muybridge’s images (like all images) are neither free-standing, unique, things-in-themselves, nor mere ciphers for a wider “context.” I hope that, in doing this, I help to collapse the image/context distinction and show how Muybridge’s photographs, particularly the photographs of horses, were an important part of developing conceptions of space, time, and mobility. They were images with agency—not just reflections of a context that is always elsewhere but constitutive elements in the emergence of a new world. I will focus on the two main elements of this image: the figure and ground—the

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horse and the grid. In what follows, then, I move between close attention to Muybridge’s photographs and an insistence on understanding the images as part of a wider constellation of mobility. The concept of a constellation of mobility arises from my own work and the wider “new mobilities paradigm” or “mobilities turn” that has encouraged a focus on mobility across the humanities and social sciences over the past several decades.1 Before considering the meaning of the term “mobility,” however, what do I mean by “constellation”? In this context, the word “constellation” is derived from the work of Walter Benjamin.2 Throughout his writing life Benjamin interrogated how individual things were related to larger wholes—how individual historical fragments could be related to an encompassing idea. In this sense, Benjamin’s problem is also my own in the construction of this essay. How are Muybridge’s images, and particularly his image of a horse, related to the larger idea of mobility? Larger ideas cannot be allowed to swallow the particularities of individual things (Muybridge’s photos in this case), and neither should particularities be allowed to stand alone. Temporality adds a further dimension. The word “constellation” typically refers to our detection of a pattern from individual points of light in the night sky. An important aspect of this process is our distance from what we are seeing (in space and time). Historical research, for Benjamin, involved gathering a differentiated collection of particular phenomena and arranging them into patterns with each other and with the concerns of the present— the context of the text, the author, and the audience. That is my task here. The idea at hand is mobility. Work in the new mobilities paradigm centers both the idea of mobility and empirical instances of mobility in the world, and in so doing works against the valorization of rootedness, place, and clearly bounded spaces in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and geography, as well as in the humanities. While it is, in some sense, a recognition of a hyper-mobile present where mobility appears to be central to our

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lifeworlds, it also recognizes that mobility has particular histories that need excavation. Mobility here means more than movement or motion, which for our purposes mean the same thing. It helps to think of mobility as the mobile equivalent of place. Place is a rich center of meaning that is both inscribed with meaning and gives meaning to its inhabitants.3 Places have locations, but a place is not the same as a location. A location is an objective position in abstract space marked by longitude and latitude. In the same way, mobility can be thought of as a meaning-laden and meaning-giving geographical element of existence. Just as place can be distinguished from location, so mobility is more than movement. Movement can be measured, tracked, quantified, and mapped. It is an elemental part of the universe. Mobility includes movement but is meaningful and exists in contexts of power. Movement becomes mobility when it is experienced, represented, and inserted into wider narratives and ideologies. Mobility is movement plus meaning plus power.4 The concept of a constellation of mobility, therefore, refers to historically specific alignments of forms and patterns of physical movement, meanings and narratives of movement, and distinctive practices of moving. These are all interrelated. Certain patterns of movement, such as those enabled by train travel for instance, have been linked to narratives of movement such as progress, pathology or, in the American case, manifest destiny. These are further connected to mobile practices such as those of the itinerant hobo on the one hand and the elite traveler in the comfortable Pullman carriage on the other.5 Each is part of the other, and together they form a prevailing sense of mobility at any one time. Along with prevailing or established constellations there are always older ones bursting through into the present and future ones whose outlines we can begin to see as they emerge from present patterns. Train travel in the US context, for example, was preceded by a con-

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stellation centered on the affordances of horses and was followed by what is generally called “automobility”—the era of the car.6 Horses and cars are obvious elements in constellations of mobility. Perhaps slightly less obviously, the camera and photography are too. The history of photography has been (among other things) the gradually increasing capacity to move as part of an image-making person/camera assemblage. New ways of being mobile have been enabled through the technological affordances of the camera. The progressive shrinking of the size and weight of the equipment necessary to take photographs meant that the camera gradually became part of the paraphernalia of forms of travel, from global exploration to the city stroll.7 The camera and the practice of taking photos have become a central part of the activities of tourism, and photography is now a material instantiation of the tourist gaze.8 Few of us in the wealthier parts of the world now travel without a camera—and few of us are able to move without being recorded by cameras. It is in the context of this notion of constellations of mobility that I want to turn to the remarkable endeavors of Eadweard Muybridge. The essay begins with an introduction to Muybridge’s horse photos, explaining their origins and purpose as well as the elaborate technique that Muybridge invented to capture them. The following sections consider the key elements of the image—the horse and the background made up of lines and numbers—in relation to wider cultures of mobility. Towards the end, I leap forward to the present day, to explore ways in which Muybridge’s images prefigure contemporary forms of camera/mobility relations, particularly those of surveillance. First, however, it is necessary to account for the existence of the image of the trotting horse and carriage. Eadweard Muybridge, an English immigrant photographer, and Leland Stanford, a former governor of California, began their relationship in the

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spring of 1872. Muybridge was already a well-established photographer, and Stanford hired him to photograph his horses.9 His earlier photographs had focused on landscapes both natural (Yosemite) and urban (San Francisco). In each case he fixed on slightly uncanny and mobile elements of scenes, prefiguring the work on mobile subjects considered here. When photographing waterfalls in Yosemite, for instance, he experimented with shutter speeds and exposures to capture, in Rebecca Solnit’s words, “an accurate recording not of water as such but the accumulation of its movements over a period of time.”10 For these reasons it is not that surprising that Stanford hired him. It was not unusual for wealthy owners of racehorses to have them immortalized in art, but Stanford’s purposes combined art with science. He believed that the performance of horses could be analyzed scientifically, and he wanted to know if all four feet left the ground while the horse was trotting. It was for this reason that Muybridge was to spend the next five years developing a mechanism for capturing the movements of horses through photography. His efforts finally paid off in 1876 and 1877 when he was able to combine several new technologies that he played a role in inventing, including faster film and faster, electrically triggered, shutters. Before capturing a series of images of Stanford’s horse Occident in motion, he first took a single image of Occident travelling at thirty-six feet per second in order to test the ability of the lens, shutter, and film to capture an image in one thousandth of a second, a time period in which the horse did not move more than one quarter of an inch. Muybridge sent a photograph of Occident to Alta California on August 2, 1877, along with an explanation of how it was taken. The magazine published an account of the image but not the image itself. The exact image that was sent to the magazine is lost to us. In the months that followed a variety of images of horses taken by Muybridge would appear in the press across the world. Perhaps the first surviving image is a 5 × 7 in. card made by Muybridge (figure 2) with an accompanying explanatory text.

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Figure 2.  Eadweard Muybridge, “Occident. Owned by Leland Stanford. Driven by Jas. Tennant, 1877.” Photo: LC-DIG-ppmsca-09653, Library of Congress.

‘Occident,’ owned by Leland Stanford, trotting at a 2:30 gait over the Sacramento track, in July 1877. The exposure of the original negative of this photograph was less than the two-thousandth part of a second. The details have been retouched. In this position the horse is entirely clear of the ground, but just about to alight.

When viewers saw Muybridge’s first images of a horse, they found them aesthetically unnerving, and many believed them to be a hoax.11 The position of the horse transgressed all established aesthetic conventions of what a horse looked like in artistic representations. Viewers who were used to seeing paintings of horses in motion expected to see the front legs pointing forwards and the back legs pointing backwards, as on a rocking horse. These new images, on the other hand, had legs arranged in what appeared to be chaotic disarray—a chaos that seemed to be both amusing and horrifying at the same time.12 Even after it was established that Muybridge’s images were

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Figure 3.  John Koch, “Occident Trotting.” 1877. Gouache and watercolor with photograph on hardboard, 47.63 × 60.33 cm (18 ¾ × 23 ¾ in.). Photo: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University: Stanford Family Collections.

not an elaborate aesthetic fraud, many artists continued to adhere to the older imagined arrangements of body parts as a truer aesthetic (if not scientific) rendering of equine motion.13 And there were some elements of deception in this image of Occident. It was, in fact, a photograph of a painting of Occident in motion by John Koch, onto which Muybridge has superimposed a photographic image of Tennant’s face (figure 3). The painting was, however, based on the original photograph taken by Muybridge—an image that may not have been clear enough to be worthy of printing. It is likely that

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Muybridge projected the negative using a magic lantern onto a canvas which could then be traced and filled in by Koch.14 This process was not unusual at the time. In this image the horse and buggy shown trotting are placed in a conventional scene with a road and picket fence which has been painted in. In many ways, despite the arrangement of the legs, this image does conform to conventions of horse portraiture at the time. The background locates the horse, and the horse’s mobility, in a familiar place. Despite these aesthetic efforts to make the horse fit the standards of the day, the image was still met with skepticism. As the “Rambling Writer” of the San Francisco Post wrote on August 3: “Either the camera did lie, or Stanford has got the most extraordinary horse in the world . . . and he can make more money by exhibiting it than by trotting it.”15 Muybridge’s next step was to present a series of images of a moving horse as it completed one stride. Once the new shutters and film had been proved up to the task, he had to devise a system that would take images in rapid sequence. Working in Stanford’s stables at Palo Alto, California, Muybridge lined up twelve sets of his new apparatus, each attached to a wire that would be tripped as the wheels of a cart pulled by a horse passed over it (figure 4). Muybridge also had to develop an appropriate space in which to capture the images. He needed to produce the maximum possible contrast between the horse and the background in order to demonstrate the phases of motion. To do this he constructed a white backdrop marked with black vertical lines arranged at twenty-one-inch intervals, each given a consecutive number. The ground across which the horse and cart would run was also made white by covering it in lime (calcium carbonate). The resulting images no longer paid their respects to the bucolic traditions of horse portraiture. This new background announced itself as part of the process of scientific proof. What followed was a highly unusual event in the history of photography: an invitation to journalists to witness photographs being taken so that they

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Figure 4.  Multiple camera setup at Palo Alto. 1881–82. Book, 31.5 × 26 × 4.8 cm (12 ⅜ × 10 ¼ × 1 ⅞ in.). Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon.

could be sure of the authenticity of both the photographic technique and the fact that horses did appear to leave the ground while trotting. The plans were announced in Alta California and were reprinted around the world. In London, The Tablet featured the story on September 22, 1877. A TROTTING HORSE.—The San Francisco Alta of the 11th of August says:—‘In our mention of the photographs taken by Muybridge of Occident at full speed we stated that it was the intention of Mr. Stanford to have a series of views taken to show the step at all its stages, so as to settle the controversy among horsemen about the question whether a fast trotter ever has all his feet in the air at once. Mr. Muybridge has now received his instructions, and will commence his work so soon as he can receive the needful lenses from London and have machinery made here. Occident moves 20ft. at a stride, and Mr. Muybridge will have a dozen photographic cameras placed at intervals of 2ft., making a total distance of 24ft., a little more than a full stride. The shutters

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of these cameras will be opened and shut by electricity (sic) as the horse passes in front of each, the time of exposure being as before not more than the thousandth part of a second. The 12 pictures will be taken within twothirds of a second, the time required for travelling 24ft. at a speed of 2’37. Each picture will be taken by a double lens, so as to be adapted for the stereoscope, and will thus furnish the most conclusive proof to connoisseurs that it is faithfully taken by photography, and not materially changed by retouching.’16

In the resulting image the horse would appear as a silhouette against the giant ruler-like backdrop with the numbers indicating the motion. This apparatus was successfully used on June 15, 1878, in front of the invited audience including journalists. First the horse Abe Edgington was used, pulling a carriage. The wheels of the carriage rolled over the wires on the ground and tripped the shutters of Muybridge’s new cameras. Later the mare Sallie Gardner was ridden without a carriage and had to break lines strung across her path rather than contact lines on the ground. The mare was disturbed by the repeated collisions with wires and leaped in the air midway through the process.17 Muybridge developed the images instantly (within twenty minutes) so that the onlookers could vouch for the authenticity of the images, and the photographer quickly became a local, then national, then international news story. The feat performed by Muybridge, an artist of this coast . . . is second only, among the marvels of the age, to the wonderful discoveries of the telephone and phonograph. . . . The negatives were very small, but perfect in outline and detail even to showing the shape of each spoke in the wheel. . . . These pictures, which could not be otherwise than true, prove that the horse in trotting assumes positions never dreamed of before—positions which, while they rob the horse of that gracefulness generally credited to him when going at full speed, the knowledge of which will nevertheless prove invaluable to persons concerned in the care and training of trotters. They show the legs to be in almost all conceivable positions.18

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Muybridge’s horse images marked the start of his increasingly sophisticated obsession with bodies of all kinds in motion. They made the world of motion visible, and in doing so reversed photography’s preoccupation with extracting stillness from the chaos of the world. They played a key role in the process of reanimating the world—a process that would eventually lead to movies. Muybridge’s ground-breaking photography can be linked to general transformations in the sense of movement that marked the nineteenth century. It made sense within an emerging constellation of mobile practices, meanings, and patterns. In April 1830, the month of Muybridge’s birth, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world’s first public railway, was still six months away. Human mobility was limited by the velocities of horses, water, and wind. When Muybridge died in 1904 the earth was linked by a massive and intricate web of rail and steam—a new machine ensemble for human motion.19 The air too was about to be colonized, as the Wright Brothers had successfully flown a powered aircraft just six months earlier. The process of time-space compression was in full swing.20 This wasn’t just the distanced context for Muybridge’s efforts. He was very much part of the process. Leland Stanford was the president of the Central Pacific Railroad and thus played several roles in the transformation of constellations of mobility. The money that paid for Muybridge’s labor and the horses in his pictures was raised, in part, from the development of the railroad and the land that surrounded it. As my co-author, John Ott, has written, “Leland Stanford and his colleagues publicly staged and disseminated these photographs in order to consolidate, promote, and naturalize the developments of industrial capitalism,” adding that “I do not find it coincidental, then, that the owner and manager of locomotives was interested in the mechanics of animal locomotion.”21 Muybridge’s photographic practice, then, formed part of an emerging constellation of mobility and only makes sense as part of it. Just as a sense of new mobilities was key to this world, so

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was an older world, one in which horses played a central part. This world, at least in the west, was on the verge of extinction as Muybridge took his images of Occident. An old constellation of mobility was fading and a new one was being born. As well as being derived from the writing of Walter Benjamin, the concept of a constellation of mobility is informed by other scholars who have sought to understand the production of mobilities within wider social and cultural configurations. Two of these are the semiotician Norman Bryson and the philosopher of science Ian Hacking. Bryson identifies patterns of movement that connected seemingly different forms of moving within an historical period. He draws on Roland Barthes’s argument that meaning arises through mobility, but in a way constrained by a field of conventions that authorize specific meanings. In other words, forms of mobility can produce meaning. This meaning is not spontaneous or natural, but created through the relations between individual movements and wider conventions and institutions of movement. [W]hat would count as significant, organized, socially structured movement is in practice decided by social values (intellectual, ethical, political) and by institutional conventions: one could perhaps study any old set of movements, but in practice the decision as to what one chooses to study is discursively and historically constrained. And constrained twice over: by what the society that one studies proposed as its definition of significant human movement; and by what in our own contexts of scholarship are thought to be the areas in which larger cultural patterns and values may be found and thought about.22

This approach, that understands particular kinds of movement in the context of a field of socially structured movement, might be accused of reducing particular movements to mere examples or instances of wider cultural phenomena. It might be argued, for instance, that such an approach would make

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the particularities of the photograph and photography (in the case at hand) disappear under the weight of “context.” I believe, as Bryson argues with regards to dance, that the opposite is true: in locating Muybridge’s photography in a constellation of mobilities—an historical and geographical field of socially structured movement—photography does not evaporate, but can be seen as a cultural form that is located right at the heart of a social and cultural formation in which mobility is central. There is, in other words, no distance between photography and some wider explanatory context. Photography is not determined by some other thing called society or the economy—neither does it reflect it. It is part of it. Not marginal but central. In order to illustrate his case, Bryson focuses on the Parisian dance the cancan. Such a dance, he argues, is best understood in an expanded field of the study of structured mobilities, as dance is but one instance of socially structured mobility where movement is made meaningful within conventions and institutions that authorize meaning. The cancan, he suggested, needs to be considered as an example of the move towards standardization and mechanization at the end of the nineteenth century. Bryson considers Seurat’s painting, Le Chahut, which features dancers dancing the cancan (figure 5). This painting, he argues, represents a moment of excess, “a release of bodily energies in a wild and dangerous defiance of the law.”23 Yet, he argues, the painting also and simultaneously returns the body to a thoroughly disciplined, mechanized, and abstracted spectacle: The new dances of the late nineteenth century break free of the armature of respectability that had imprisoned the body in a cage of bourgeois repression; they reveal and liberate a new level of public sexuality; the police are called in. But even without the police, the cancan . . . marks a new advance of mechanized order into the body’s movements. Though erotic, the dance is entirely impersonal, dehumanized, and repetitious; though it reveals the anatomical body with unprecedented frankness, this is accompanied by an

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Figure 5.  Georges Seurat, Le Chahut. 1889/90. Oil on canvas, 170 × 141 cm (66.92 × 55.12 in.). Photo: Wikicommons.

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extraordinary objectification of the body by its owner, who in order to perform the dance successfully (pulling one leg straight up to the head while hopping on the other) must treat her body absolutely as a thing, as a puppet or marionette.24

This process of objectification is linked to a process of abstraction. Bryson argues that the history of dance (like the history of art) follows a path towards pure form and away from mimetic relations to an exterior world or narrative. In its purest form, Bryson argues, dance is freed from all reference to either narrative meaning or musical score. This is modern dance. This process of abstraction is an end point that resists being explained in relation to something else beyond abstraction. Bryson’s approach to this is to historicize abstraction itself by linking the abstraction of movement in dance to other realms: the increasing mechanization of workplace mobilities away from artisanal craft practices and towards the machine-led movements of mass production. One way to move beyond the framework of modernist criticism is to look for meanings in the term abstraction that refer to other domains of movement than dance, to other social regions where motion is analyzed and represented, and to larger social processes that turn on the redesigning and stylization of action and gesture.25

Bryson refers to this kind of analysis as “social kinetics”—a history of socially structured movement. The cancan is right at the heart of a process of the abstraction of movement the followed the Industrial Revolution. This process combined an economic system that insisted on the quantification of human labor under capitalism and a technical system that measured movement in terms of a consistent and abstract calculus. The meshing together of economic and kinetic abstraction in industrialization represents, in anthropological terms, an epochal change in the history of socially structured movement and in the human object world; over a course of three centuries the Western vision of industrial movement gradually imposes itself on a global scale.26

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In this sense the cancan needs to be understood within a field of abstracted mobilities that includes the time-motion study of Taylorism in factories, the rise of the railroad, clock time, and timetables in urban life.27 All of these link the body to machine mobilities of fragmentation, repetition, and velocity. And all, of course, were happening at more or less the same time as Muybridge was perfecting his techniques for capturing motion through photography. It was also at this time that the French medical establishment became fascinated by the phenomenon of respectable citizens embarking on long journeys while forgetting exactly who they were. Ian Hacking’s book Mad Travelers dissects the diagnosis of “fugue” in a way that, like Bryson’s “social kinetics,” seeks to understand a particular instance of movement within a wider field of mobilities.28 Fugue refers to “strange and unexpected trips, often in states of obscured consciousness” that, in 1887 in France, became a specific form of insanity that could be diagnosed.29 Hacking’s purpose is to explore the way in which some forms of illness are “transient mental illnesses”—illnesses that appear to be specific to a particular time and place. The focus on fugue is constrained by the fact that, for the most part, this was a diagnosis that began in a time and place and, for the most part, ended in a time and place. His purpose is not to say whether the illness was real or not, but to account for its history and geography—to show how a particular kind of mobility was accounted for in a particular medical way. Importantly for us, the accounting included reference to other forms of mobility that were prevalent in the same time and place. The term Hacking uses for this spatiotemporal context is a “niche.” I argue that one fruitful idea for understanding transient mental illness is the ecological niche, not just social, not just medical, not just coming from the patient, not just from the doctors, but from the concatenation of an extraordinarily large number of diverse types of elements which for a moment provide a stable home for certain types of manifestation of illness.30

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So what were the aspects of this niche that it made it possible to produce a diagnosis of fugue? One was tourism. This, as Hacking reminds us, was the period of the democratization of travel. Thomas Cook was initiating tourism for the masses in England. Tourist hotels were being constructed from Switzerland to Biarritz. The flâneur was busy being born in Baudelaire’s poetry, and Jules Verne was writing of travel as adventure on an epic scale.31 In addition to tourism, this was also a time and place of panics over vagrancy—the dark underside of tourism.32 Around 1870, Hacking argues, vagabondage became the social problem par excellence in France. It was a time and place of increasing surveillance (people had to carry their identity cards with them) and fierce anti-vagrancy laws. Vagrants were punished with imprisonment or exile. Vagrancy was also medicalized as a mental pathology. In sum: Fugue perfectly fitted between two social phenomena that loomed very large in contemporary consciousness: romantic tourism and criminal vagrancy, one virtuous, one vicious. Both were deeply important to the middle classes, because one stood for leisure, pleasure, and fantasy escape, while the other stood for fear of the underworld. So, fugue, as a phenomenon, was not interesting to ordinary people who did not go on meaningless and compulsive trips, people who could control their fantasies or indulge in them. It was an option that for the less fortunate lay between affluence and crime.33

Hacking’s notion of a niche provides a context for understanding fugue as a form of pathological mobility made possible by the coalescence of vectors including tourism, vagrancy and surveillance in late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century France. Once these vectors ceased to exist in the same manner (the vagrancy panic diminished) then fugue ceased to be a common diagnosis. The idea of a niche works well for Bryson’s account of dance too— it provides a context for understanding the cancan as a dance that made sense in relation to a coalescence of other forms of mechanization and abstraction in late-nineteenth-century Paris. In both Bryson and Hacking’s

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accounting for forms of mobility there is an effort to understand forms of mobility in relation to each other. Both are also accounts of the period in which Muybridge’s photographic practice was revolutionizing how we view mobility. Both Bryson and Hacking explore the intersection between instances of mobility and the contexts in which they can be meaningful. Neither sees mobilities as straightforwardly determined by context but, rather, see mobilities as an integral part of a network of mobilities (and types of stillness) that combine to form something greater than an individual instance. Bryson’s promotion of social kinetics and Hacking’s development of the niche both direct us towards seeing Muybridge’s work as part of something larger. In the case of Muybridge’s horse, it is tempting to read the horse (and the photograph) as overwhelmed by the weight of the modern, signified by the gridded and numbered background. Instead, Muybridge, the horse, and the photograph are not simply instantiating the context they exist in, but playing an important role in bringing that context into being. Indeed, as we will see towards the end of this essay, they could even be seen as agents in the production of mobilities we are experiencing in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Let us return, then, to Muybridge’s images of horses and examine them in more detail. First, consider the foreground and the figure of the horse and then, the background to his photographs—an emerging grid. I conclude with some comments about the combination of horse and grid and the ways in which these images maintain a ghostly presence in representational practices of the present day. Muybridge’s images of horses in motion connect a world in which the horse was central to one in which mechanized mobility, and particularly the train, took over.34 The advent of railroad, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, had produced an extensive machine ensemble

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that had rapidly connected disparate points across continents. Accompanying the railroad came time-space compression—the effective shrinking of distance through reduction in travel time.35 Communication was simultaneously made quicker and easier through the telegraph lines that accompanied the railroad (in order to make the signals work and regulate the trains). It is hard for us now to imagine how central to life horses would have been in northern California in the 1870s. Horses were both part of everyday life and symbols of wealth and success. The transport historian Clay McShane has described the period after the Civil War through the end of the century as the “gelded age”—the high point for the history of the horse in America.36 Never before had there been so many horses in relation to the number of people in cities. It would be a mistake to simply contrast animal with machine mobilities. Horses in 1870s America had an intimate connection to machines. Muybridge’s images illustrate this connection—the body of the horse against the rational backdrop of a giant ruler. In many ways, horses were cyborg animals, often connected to carriages of one kind of another (as in the first image of Occident) and always the product of centuries of human intervention.37 Horses were, in a very real sense, cyborgs, a complex system of mechanical and biological characteristics integrated to perform certain kinds of work. Of course, man had been granted the raw material by the happenstance of evolution, but through a process of domination and controlled breeding, he had altered the system over time to yield desired results. The mechanical part was not too difficult to work out. Trial and error determined optimum feeding patterns, work schedules, and depreciation models. The biological aspect was more complex. Horses had gender, feelings, and deeply ingrained behaviors, some genetic and some derived from experience. To employ the horse to maximum benefit, humans were obligated both to recognize and respect the animal’s unique characteristics and, in certain ways, to modify their own behaviors to accommodate the horses’.38

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Horses were thought of in mechanical terms. The idea of “horsepower,” invented by James Watt along with his steam engine in 1775, is still with us and is used in our descriptions of machines and their capabilities. It was the fact that horses had the “power” of seven or eight humans that made them indispensable in industry and transportation. Much of the early industrial revolution was based on the conversion of the mobility of horses into the circular motion of machinery through a process of gear and cogs. The labor of horses merged with the labor of people in both rural and urban contexts. Cities were habitats shared by people and horses and, in many ways, shaped for this symbiotic relationship. Stables took up a significant amount of urban space. It was not until the last decade of the nineteenth century that horses began to disappear from everyday life at a dramatic rate as steam power took over from horsepower, first in factories and then on public streets as electric-powered trams became common. The first electric cable cars in San Francisco were introduced in 1873, the year after Stanford first approached Muybridge. By 1900 the automobile had become a symbol of modernity and prestige—a role once performed by the horse. But even by 1900 there were still only twenty humans for every horse in San Francisco.39 Horses were also central to artistic practice both in the United States and in Europe. In fact, horses had been a continuous thread in the history of art since the ancient cave paintings discovered in Lascaux in France. More recent equine art would have been familiar to the readers of newspapers featuring Muybridge’s photographs. Paintings of western frontier scenes, as well as racing scenes, were very popular in 1870s America. It was the familiarity people had with these latter images that caused some commentators to be so upset with Muybridge’s images, which looked so unlike the typical painting of a rocking-horse pose (figure 6). Artistic practice helps us to understand the constellation of mobility, or the niche, in Hacking’s terms, of which Muybridge’s images were a

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Figure 6.  J. Baille, “Great Race Between Peytona and Fashion, for $20,000!!!” 1845. Photo: LC-USZ62–843, Library of Congress.

constitutive part. Horses featured alongside trains in the landscape painting tradition that accompanied the westward movement of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier—a frontier he would declare closed in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair.40 One well-known example is John Gast’s metaphysical American Progress from 1872 (figure 7), which can be read left to right as a portrait of civilization through mobilities, moving from Native American on horses, to horse-drawn Conistoga wagons, to a more elaborate horse-andcarriage setup, to trains. There is a sense of horse-based worlds being surpassed by the telegraph lines and trains steaming out of the lighter east. This painting, like many at the time, captured the transformation in constellations of mobility that was still happening as Muybridge took his

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Figure 7.  John Gast, American Progress. 1873. Chromalithograph, 37.6 × 39 cm. Photo: LC-USZC4–668, Library of Congress.

photographs. A residual world of horse-based mobility was being rapidly eroded and replaced by a world of mechanized mobility most clearly symbolized by the train. This leads me to the ground of Muybridge’s images— the grid. The background to Muybridge’s photographs is often taken for granted.41 In his early photographs of horses, the background is divided into equal spaces by the giant ruler he used as a background. In later photographs of humans in motion this became a grid (figure 8). In the early images of horses, the background consists of white space, vertical straight black lines, and numbers in a sequence. Over time, horizontal lines were added, and the background changed from white with black lines to black with white lines.

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Figure 8.  “A Man Walking Up Stairs” (Animal Locomotion, Plate 21). Collotype after Eadweard Muybridge. 1887. Collotype, 25.5 × 30 cm. Photo: Wellcome Collection.

The lines got closer together and the numbers disappeared. Combined, these lines, spaces, and numbers produced the ground upon which the figure of the horse, and particularly the movement of the horse, was made legible. The blank (white and, later, black) space between the lines is there to negate any interference in our comprehension of movement in the image. Blank space is the nothingness that comes before meaning and allows objects to exist as separate entities. Despite its apparent blankness, however, this space is not without meaning. Blank white space is also the space within which science symbolically exists, from the white page of graphs and tables, to the clean white space that symbolizes the laboratory. It suggests the possibility of being nowhere in particular and potentially anywhere—the opposite of place. Blank space, in other words, takes us out of the particular and gestures towards the universal. It is not just the iconography of blank space that enrolls the power

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of science, however; the whole of Muybridge’s enterprise, first in Palo Alto and then in Philadelphia, was supported by the framework of science. The mechanism which Muybridge used to capture his images was more of a laboratory than it was a studio and, as John Ott has written elsewhere, “The very set-up of the camera shed and complex recording instruments recall the forum of a research laboratory, a milieu that grew to maturity in the industrial sector in the 1870s and 1880s.” 42 Ott notes further that Stanford chose to publish the photos alongside the technical commentary of the scientific authority Dr. J. D. B. Stillman. The blank space that appears in Muybridge’s images is just one part of an infrastructure of scientific legitimation. The blank space is divided, at regular intervals, by vertical black lines. The straight lines can themselves be seen as symptoms of a modernist drive to order and linearity. Anthropologist Tim Ingold has suggested that the “line that is properly linear is assumed to be straight.” In modern times, he argues, “straightness has come to epitomize not only rational thought and disputation but also the values of civility and moral rectitude.” 43 In Western societies, straight lines are ubiquitous. We see them everywhere, even when they do not really exist. Indeed, the straight line has emerged as a virtual icon of modernity, an index of the triumph of rational, purposeful design over the vicissitudes of the natural world. The relentlessly dichotomizing dialectic of modern thought has, at one time or another, associated straightness with mind as against matter, with rational thought as against sensory perception, with intellect as against intuition, with science as against traditional knowledge, with male as against female, with civilization as against primitiveness, and—on the most general level—with culture as against nature.44

As part of the background to Muybridge’s images, the lines combined with the dislocating effects of blank space to suggest rationality and certitude—the ability to quantify and know. The presence of numbers in Muybridge’s early motion images is not accidental here. The logic of numbers

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suggests quantitative certainty as well as establishing sequence and apparent measurability. Numbers, like blank space and straight lines, are part of the iconography of science. Counting things is one way of making them exchangeable and equivalent. Numbers give qualitatively unlike things a value and are thus central to capitalist market mechanisms as well as governmentality, management, and science.45 The combination of numbers with abstract space and straight lines was a familiar assemblage often used in techniques of knowing and discipline. The replacement of time based on the position of the sun with clock time was achieved through numbers, as was the surveying and mapping of space across the American West. This was particularly the case when horizontal lines were added to the vertical ones to produce the grid that appears in Muybridge’s later images. As anthropologist James C. Scott has written, “delivering mail, collecting taxes, taking a census, moving supplies and people in and out of the city, putting down a riot or insurrection, digging for pipes and sewer lines, finding a felon or a conscript (provided he is at the address given), and planning public transportation, water supply and trash removal are all made vastly simpler by the logic of the grid.” 46 Sociologist Richard Sennett, likewise, describes the use of the grid in urban planning as the production of “neutral space” designed to organize, manage, and dominate urban populations and diminish the particularity of “place.” 47 Grids and the ways of knowing that accompanied them were part of the accelerating drive to abstract space, time, and motion that Muybridge’s images helped to form. The lines, and then the grid, even when they had no obvious function, served the aesthetic purpose of making something appear ordered and objective. It would be a mistake, however, to think of blank space, straight lines, numbers, or grids as entirely inventions of modernity. Straight lines as part of a grid pattern have been around in human history for a very long time. The history of human settlement in cities, from ancient China to the modernist plans of Corbusier, is replete with instances of the grid plan.48 Nevertheless,

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the combination of space, lines, numbers, and grids was particularly prevalent in Muybridge’s America, from Jefferson’s land survey of 1787 to the arrangement of streets in New York or San Francisco.49 The grid played a number of roles in late-nineteenth-century America. It evoked an aesthetic of order at the same time as it literally and figuratively enabled the production of space by making land into transferable property.50 Just ten years before Muybridge met Stanford, the Homestead Act of 1862 had sold off land in 160-acre rectangular lots. The grid signified and actualized space as a commodity no longer reliant on the material realities of ecology and topography.51 There were grids in other places too. In 1869 the ethnologist John Lamprey used a grid to make well-known anthropometric studies of Malayan men (figures 9a and 9b). Lamprey’s grid, which formed the backdrop to his image of a human body, was made out of wooden frames to which he attached a lattice of silk threads. Just as the grid of the American landscape gave land the sheen of objective measurability, so Lamprey’s grid signified scientific rationality, freeing his image from the realm of particular forms of visual subjectivity. The grid took Malayan men out of the realm of subjecthood and placed them in a visual regime of objectivity. The Malayan man ceased to be an individual person and, instead, became a “type.”52 This, as the anthropologist Henry Huxley put it, would enable “the formation of a systematic series of photographs of the various races of men comprehended within the British Empire.”53 Lamprey’s grid (developed in 1869) became part of the biopolitical management of populations that was emerging at the time and with which we still live today.54 Elspeth Brown has shown how the fully developed grid in Muybridge’s photography was seen for the first time in the only images he took of a black man, the boxer Ben Bailey (figure 15), also discussed here in Ott’s essay. Brown suggests that “[I]t is as if the nonwhite ‘other’ cannot be understood, scientifically, without the anthropometric grid, a technology for mapping racial difference.”55

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Figures 9a and 9b.  John Lamprey, Front and side view of Malayan Man, Ternate, aged 25. c. 1868–69. Photo: Royal Anthropological Institute.

The grid in Lamprey’s images, though, is itself reliant on the master grid of Ptolemy’s world map of the second century AD (figure 10). The aesthetic and logic of the grid in the images of Malayan Man and in Muybridge’s increasingly gridded photographs is cartographic, harking back to the use of grids in mapping. Ptolemy’s grid allowed us to think of the highly irregular earth as geometry. It initiated the process that allowed the infinitely variable surface of the inhabited earth to be subjected to questions of size, mass, and scale, allowing seemingly disparate things to be compared—a process that led to the more familiar world map of Gerardus Mercator in 1569.

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Figure 10.  Ptolomy’s second projection, 2nd century AD. 1482 edition by Nicolaus Germanus. Photo: Wikicommons.

So, what work does the grid do? In one sense the grid signifies nothing— it points towards the eradication of meaning in favor of a kind of emptiness and flatness. It points toward the universal rather than the particular. This is how the art theorist Rosalind Krauss accounts for the role of the grid in modern art: In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back to nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real

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and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface. In the overall regularity of its organization, it is the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree. Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves; the relationships in the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final.56

Here the grid, as with Ingold’s straight line, is positioned against nature. Krauss insists that the grid in the work of Mondrian and others allowed them to, in her words, “land in a place that was out of reach of everything that went before, which is to say, they landed in the present, and everything else was declared to be the past.”57 Krauss sees the grid in modern art as a sign of absolute separation from a gridless past. Outside of the world of art, grids, as Hannah Higgins has shown us, have been a constant in human history, linking the ledgers of account books to musical notation and bricklaying.58 Nevertheless, this arrangement of lines in the backdrop to Muybridge’s horses, and later people, appear to signify a break from nature and an embrace of scientific modernity. In either case, the grid is more than a representation. It is a practice of representation that does work. It acts to level and distribute and is often the precondition for acts of counting and calculation. Geographer Matthew Hannah, for instance, has insisted that the work done in gridding the United States was the precondition for the American census of 1880 directed by Francis Walker.59 Just as the imposition of grids on space made the formally anarchic world legible, so the grid that forms the backdrop to Muybridge’s horses makes mobility legible. But this legibility was, finally, aesthetic more than it was “scientific.” As John Pultz put it with reference to some of Muybridge’s later images of humans in motion: The grids against which the figures move and the grids into which the individual frames are organized suggest a level of scientific certitude that the photographs do not have, primarily because the relationships of time and space from frame to frame are neither obvious nor specified.60

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Grids serve a double function in Muybridge’s images. As well as providing a backdrop for moving bodies, the images were also presented sequentially in another kind of grid. After successfully demonstrating his technique for capturing the horse in motion, Muybridge copyrighted and published cabinet cards in which he arranged a series of individual images of various horses in motion in three rows on a larger card and then photographed that in order to capture the sequence of positions the horse passed through as it moved. These master grids were given black borders around the whole layout as well as between each image. They usually featured twelve images which, combined, covered a single stride and were sold for $2.50. In these arrangements the horse becomes twice gridded. The first gridding (the backdrop) removes the horse from a recognizable landscape and makes its motion appear measurable. The second inserts the horse in a kind of linear narrative—but one which begins before the image and ends after it. The second grid dislocates the horse’s stride completely, placing it outside of actually existing time and space. Both the horse and the viewer are dissociated from any firm coordinates. This point is made by the artist Sol LeWitt, one of whose works is called “Muybridge 1”: “When space is divided up into such equal parts, a kind of negation of space takes place. All parts are given equal value and space is so systematized that it becomes least important; in the resulting inertia sequence becomes most important.”61 Art theorist and historian Jonathan Crary has suggested that Muybridge turns stability into process. “[T]he horse, which had been for thousands of years the primary mode of vehicular movement in human societies, is symbolically dismantled into quantified and lifeless units of time and movement.”62 The sequencing which the framing grid enacts suggests a narrative of movement as it is read in the same way we read text in the western world— left to right and top to bottom. Unlike a formal linear narrative, however, the images have no necessary start and end point. Thanks to the nature of the grid, which can extend endlessly in all directions, there is also the

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suggestion of a story that both precedes it in space and time and continues after it. It captures a sense of process and expandability rather than completeness. The image conforms precisely to John Kouwenhoven’s classic essay on “What’s American about America,” in which he argues that the grid pattern, jazz, chewing gum, and a host of other “American” things are united by an obsession with process rather than finished perfection. The city grid and the skyscraper, he argues, are marked by “simple and infinitely repeatable units.”63 Or, as Rosalind Krauss has put it: “By virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric. Thus the grid operates from the work of art outward, compelling our acknowledgement of a world beyond the frame.”64 The creation of sequences by Muybridge thus suggests the existence of larger, possibly infinite, sequences before and after the action in the frames. This is despite the fact that closer observation of some of these sequences makes their arbitrary nature clear. In the case of the images of the horse Sallie Gardner for instance, as with many other Muybridge image series, it is obvious that he has tampered with the sequence of images. The final image of a horse at a complete standstill could not possibly follow on so quickly from the image before it. The numbers that appear at the top of the images also give the game away, as the numbers in this last frame are 0–6 (figure 11).65 To sum up, then, we have a series of images that include a background that becomes increasingly gridded over time and a figure of a horse that would later become people as well as other animals. These, in turn, are arranged into a metagrid in a published sequence designed to convey movement. As we have seen, the horse was very much part of life in 1870s California but was soon to be replaced in most arenas of life by other forms of power. The grid, on the other hand, was increasingly part of a sense of modernity that included the recently completed gridding of the American landscape as well as charts, timetables, account books, and a host of other everyday grids.

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Figure 11.  Eadweard Muybridge, “The Horse in Motion. ‘Sallie Gardner,’ owned by Leland Stanford; running at 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto Track, 19th June 1878.” Photo: LC-DIGppmsca-06607, Library of Congress.

The grid has been seen to evoke both a break from the past—a past which includes horses—and a break from nature—which also generally includes horses. There are, in other words, a number of tensions at play in these images that superimpose the fleshy animality of the horse on the quantitative abstraction of the background—tensions which are, in turn, part of the surrounding context of a changing constellation of mobility. What we are presented with in Muybridge’s horse pictures is, at first glance, a juxtaposition of the carnal particularity of the equine body with the placeless abstraction of white space, straight lines, and numbers. The force of the image, however, comes from the interplay of these two elements of the image. The fleshy and particular needs the empty and universal to exert influence. The particular is made particular in the context of the abstract and the abstract has no purchase on the world without real, differentiated things to attach itself to. There is a kind of friction performed in these images—a productive spark is the result.

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The horse and the grid worked together to present an image of mobility. Mobility can only be made visible in relation to some form of (relative) stillness. Muybridge realized that a stationary backdrop was needed to make movement clear. In this case the backdrop is presented as the blank, apparently value-free, space of science. But this too has a history and Muybridge’s images are part of that history. They were implicated in the production of a particular kind of space. By moving Occident into the space of science and numbers the photographer (and then the viewer) was able to see mobility in a new way. Still space is productive here as it allows us to see a new kind of mobility. But this space is not entirely context-free, as science-space likes to pretend. The point of using the space of the grid was to convince people to see horses in new ways wherever they happen to be: on streets in San Francisco perhaps. Similarly, as John Ott has shown in this volume with regard to Muybridge’s later photos of human motion, the meaning of science was transferred to the realm of sports, such as horse riding and boxing, within the legitimizing space of the University. Seemingly abstract and universal space is thus irrevocably connected to particular lived places. The backdrop to Muybridge’s horse is every bit as historical as the horse itself. Muybridge, in this photograph and others, was implicated in the production of a new kind of space and the possibilities for mobility that went with it. This new space was a calculable space, a space that would be inhabited by the “iron horse” of the railroad with its machinery and timetables. Space and mobility were becoming industrialized.

c oda Muybridge’s experiments in capturing movement recorded an older constellation of mobility passing just as it announced the emergence of a new one. They stood between two worlds represented by the background and foreground of the images. Looking backwards, Muybridge’s photographs represented a world based on non-mechanized movement dominated by the

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power of human and equine bodies as well as the wind in the sails of ships. It was a world that generally moved slowly, and never more than about 50 mph for the most elite of racehorses. In the near future was a world of mechanized mobility where travel was more regular, timetabled, precise, and certainly faster. It would be a world where, as the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has shown, the particularity of places would be eroded, and space would gradually be annihilated by time.66 Muybridge’s photographs of horses thus straddled a fading constellation of mobility and an emerging one. The images were active agents in the process of transformation. In addition to marking the transition from horse to train, the photographs Muybridge took in 1878 were instrumental in the rationalization and surveillance of bodies, starting in the workplace and expanding out into public space. When we read about expanding surveillance in the present day, we are experiencing the ghosts of Muybridge and Stanford’s horses. One of the reasons for Muybridge’s photographs of horses was to assist with their training and increase the efficiency of their gait. The photographs were tools in the production of perfect racers. The contemporary of Muybridge, Frederick Winslow Taylor, was busy institutionalizing the surveillance and management of workers’ bodies in what became known as Taylorism—or “scientific management.” The process, like Muybridge’s, involved breaking the smooth flow of mobility into manageable units and then reorganizing them. This process was further accelerated by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who added photography to Taylor’s stopwatch and took the management of mobility out of the factory and into the ideal kitchen.67 This rationalization of embodied mobility was, in turn, connected to the wider mechanization and timetabling of mobility brought about by the railroad. Sarah Gordon speculates that there may even have been a direct connection between the two, due to the presence of a civil engineer, Lewis M. Haupt, on Muybridge’s advisory commission during his time in Philadelphia. Haupt worked on the train system in the city and had written: “Suppose the

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number of persons so delayed in street cars, carriages and other vehicles and on foot is ten each time, and the detention lasts one minute, we then have 12,800 minutes, or 18 days, very nearly of 12 hours each, lost to the city by the passage of daily trains.”68 But there does not need to be such a direct connection to recognize a generally emergent constellation of mobility that Muybridge’s photographs both represented and of which they were an instrumental part—one in which mobility could be abstracted from its context and reimagined and reassembled. This emergent constellation connected the training of horses to the disciplining of laboring bodies and the efficient running of metropolitan transport systems. Despite the trappings of science and objectivity in Muybridge’s work, there are also very clear aesthetic and moral impulses at play. The photographs are part of a process aiming to achieve ever more perfect forms of mobility. As with any notion of perfection, this exists in relation to its alternatives—imperfect, or even pathological, forms of mobility. This became particularly clear in Muybridge’s later work. After his work with horses, Muybridge would go on to photograph the motions of many other animals and then humans, including himself. He moved away from Stanford’s stables and, by 1884, had found a new home in the medical world, using the facilities of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He had been invited by the artist Thomas Eakins, but Muybridge’s endeavors were marked by their status as science. It was under the cover of science that Muybridge photographed many of his human subjects naked.69 A straightforward art photographer would not have been allowed to do this, but a scientist was. The ever-more-finely-defined gridded background continued to signify science (now further specified as medicine), while the figures in the foreground stubbornly held on to older, even classical, tropes of bodily representation. Men were photographed in what were considered to be masculine forms of mobile activity such as various athletic pursuits or chopping wood, while women were shown in the process of undressing or running away from an

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Figure 12.  Eadweard Muybridge, “Nude Woman Turning Around in Surprise and Running Away” (Animal Locomotion, Plate 73). 1887. Photograph, 48 × 72 cm. Photo: University of Southern California Libraries.

invisible threat (figure 12). The gridded background was ever-present to remind us of the putative objective, scientific status of the images. Despite the grid, there is little that is obviously scientific about these images. There is a clear tension between the space of the grid in the background and the kinds of activities that take place in front of it. There is nothing to measure in the images of naked women and little to be gained in terms of developing ideal mobilities. One point in photographing Stanford’s horses was to understand the way they moved so that they might become better at racing. There is no suggestion that an image of a woman running away would make women better at avoiding threats.

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Figure 13.  Eadweard Muybridge, “Child with infantile paralysis walking on hands and feet” (Animal Locomotion, Plate 539). 1887. Photograph, 48 × 72 cm. Photo: University of Southern California Libraries.

While at the University of Pennsylvania the medical researcher Francis X. Durcum asked Muybridge to focus his increasingly sophisticated equipment on the moving bodies of humans suffering from a variety of afflictions that caused them to move in ways that were deemed “pathological” (figure 13).70 Human subjects who were morbidly obese or suffering from curvature of the spine were paraded in front of up to thirty-six cameras in order to demonstrate the numerous ways in which we are not supposed to move. These images of pathological mobility contrasted with the earlier aesthetics of muscular athletic men and naked women that were coded as normal or even exceptional examples of the way we do or should move. Muybridge’s photographs, in other words, were implicated in the differentiation of ideal, everyday, and pathological human mobilities.

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Muybridge’s photographs are hardly novel in their focus on the pathological. Indeed, almost from its inception, photography was used as part of both documentary and legal systems that sought to make the pathological visible and policeable. Anthropologists such as Lamprey were busy recording the bodies of “others” labelled as primitive in racial categorization systems while police forces captured the faces of criminals in ways that highlighted their criminality.71 Muybridge’s images of pathological mobility fall squarely within this tradition but add the ingredient of mobility. They are not only part of the photographic documentation of the abnormal and deviant, but part of an emergent constellation of mobility that constructs ideal and efficient mobilities in relation to mobilities that are pathological. It is no surprise, therefore, that photographic techniques designed to capture movement were developed in factory settings to aid in time and motion studies as part of Taylor’s “scientific management.” Good mobilities, in this context, were efficient ones, while bad ones were inefficient. This focus on pathological mobilities foreshadows contemporary forms of surveillance which attempt to identify unusual forms of human motion. Here we see the past exploding into the present. Muybridge’s images are present in ghostly form in the drive to produce abstractions of scientific mobility devoid of the individual body that are being used in a contemporary world of surveillance and security. Muybridge’s insertion of flesh and blood into logics of abstract space and quantification are right at the heart of many present-day attempts to capture and rationalize movement. Three examples stand out. One is gait analysis, a way of recording different ways of walking originally developed for physical rehabilitation and, thus, descended from Muybridge’s work on pathological mobilities. Gait analysis, however, has moved a long way beyond rehabilitation and is now being used to surveil the walking patterns of people in

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airports and elsewhere in order to decide if someone is acting “suspiciously.” People’s movements mark them, and their identities can be registered at a distance, nullifying the need for fingerprints or iris scans. Gait analysis has been rolled out in China by police authorities in Beijing and Shanghai. An article in Security Today summarizes its use and utility. The software, built by Chinese artificial intelligence company Watrix, extracts a person’s silhouette from video and analyzes the silhouette’s movement to create a model of the way the person walks. It doesn’t require special cameras—the software can use footage from surveillance cameras already in place to analyze gait.72

Gait analysis signals how our patterns of movement at a micro scale are being taken as signatures for our identities and intents. The presence of multiple cameras in airports, and increasingly in the public spaces of cities, seems like a dystopian extension of Muybridge’s Philadelphia lab with its thirty-six cameras capturing movements from all directions, constantly on the lookout for movements that seem pathological, furtive, or arrhythmic. The “extraction” of a silhouette from a background sounds remarkably like Muybridge too. The clutter of real topography has to be erased and replaced with the blank space that allows calculation and diagnosis. The visual representation of gait analysis now occurs mainly on computer screens after data has been passed through algorithms. Interestingly, gait analysis turned up in the final series of the BBC spy drama Spooks. The technology was represented on screen by the outline of bodies moving behind a superimposed grid to visually signify that movement was being framed within the visual domain of scientific certainty (see figure 14). The lived experience of the body is reduced to a series of measurements that define a rhythm. On a wider scale there is a Muybridge-like practice at the heart of one of the latest developments in mobile identification technology—the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chip. These chips have been attached to

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Figure 14.  Screen capture from “Spooks,” Series 10, Episode 1, 2011. Photo: BBC.

objects of commerce since the 1980s.73 The RFID chip contains a transponder that can emit a very low power signal that is readable by devices that are looking for it. The chip can include a large amount of data about the thing it is attached to. RFID chips have the advantage over barcodes of being readable on the move, through paint and other things that might obscure them, and at a distance. They are, in other words, designed for tracking on the move. As with Muybridge’s technologies, RFID tags have been used to record the mobilities of animals in order to discover previously uncertain forms of movement in creatures ranging from insects to pigeons.74 And RFID technology is being used on people. As with most kinds of contemporary mobility regulation, the testing ground seems to be airports. In Manchester airport in the United Kingdom, a trial has been conducted in which 50,000 passengers were tracked through the terminal using RFID tags attached to boarding passes. The airport authorities have requested that this be implemented

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permanently. Washington State, together with the US Department of Homeland Security, has recently conducted a trial involving RFID tags on state drivers’ licenses, allowing the users to travel between the states participating in the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. These tags can include much more information than is normally found on a driver’s license and can, of course, be tracked remotely.75 It is experiments such as these that have led some to predict the development of a global network of RFID receivers placed in key mobility nodes such as airports, seaports, highways, distribution centers, and warehouses, all of which are constantly reading, processing, and evaluating people’s behaviors and purchases. It is as though we are constantly tripping over invisible strings which lead to our movements being recorded, much like Occident’s.76 The third and perhaps most sinister form of movement capture is called “pattern of life analysis” and is being used by the CIA and US armed forces as part of their strategy of warfare through drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.77 Here, we see the automatic visualization of mobilities made weaponized and lethal.78 Until 2011 the CIA worked from a hit list of named people that were and are considered enemy targets. If they could be positively identified then, as far as the CIA and its legal experts were concerned, they could be killed. Towards the end of his term as President, George W. Bush authorized targeting unknown people based on their “patterns of life”—essentially mobility patterns—detected remotely from overhead drones that can stay over an area for up to twenty hours. Over many weeks ongoing surveillance attempts to produce a picture of the movement of everyday life in a particular area and then to pick out irregular and suspicious movements that deviate from the norm. This can then become the basis for a strike against unknown people. Pattern-of-life analysis is also used to predict future movements in order to theoretically reduce the likelihood of “innocent” casualties.79

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This form of surveillance marks a shift from mapping and targeting based on terrain, cities, and military installations to a mapping of bodies: bodies that are materialized as information patterns. Marking people for death—for elimination—based on “pattern-of-life” suggests that precision warfare is being used not only on behalf of the sovereign power’s ability to punish and kill globally, but of the ability and desire to kill based on a particular way of being in the world, that, while not articulated in racial terms, uses language associated with both biology and information processing to designate individuals marked for death.80

In “pattern-of-life” analysis data is extracted from the movements of bodies by software that is fed information about unusual movements from drones. A form of vision is here linked to the analysis of mobilities that are used as a proxy for forms of life deemed “guilty” or “innocent.” Gait analysis, RFID infrastructures, and pattern-of-life analysis all share a political aesthetics with Muybridge’s images. Art and science came together when Muybridge photographed a horse. His photos linked aesthetic ideals with calculability. The point of taking photos that captured the movement of horses was to produce better forms of motion and to diagnose inefficient mobilities. These judgements of good and bad, normal and pathological mobilities continued through his work with humans and it is these distinctions that we can see in modern forms of surveillance that seek to filter good, appropriate, and normal mobilities from bad, inappropriate, and pathological ones. Information gathering and regulation such as we see in modern surveillance technologies are starkly different from the mobility constellations of earlier periods. Regulation of mobility, to use Paul Virilio’s term, is increasingly dromological. Dromology is the regulation of differing capacities to move. It concerns the power to stop and put into motion, to incarcerate and accelerate objects and people.81 Virilio and others argue that previous

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architectural understandings of space-time regulation are increasingly redundant in the face of a new informational and computational landscape in which the mobility of people and things is tightly integrated with an infrastructure of software that is able to provide a motive force or increase friction at the touch of a button.82 The model for this new mode of regulation is logistics.83 The spaces from which this mobility is produced are frequently the spatial arrangement of the database and spreadsheet—new virtual and multidimensional grids. But despite these differences, the older constellation of which Muybridge formed a part continues to haunt the present. He is there in the emerging constellation of software-sorted, constantlysurveilled mobility of hybrid real and virtual space that we all inhabit as we move.

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Race and Mobility john ott

i n t roduc t ion In order to ensure that his archive of stop-motion photographs, Animal Locomotion (1887), would become the definitive encyclopedia of human and animal movement, Eadweard Muybridge hired models with “a well-earned record in the particular feat selected for illustration.”1 To this end he chose subjects whom he and his advisors at the University of Pennsylvania considered ideal rather than merely typical, with the notable exception of some thirty series that probe the “abnormal movements” of humans and horses. It might therefore come as something of a surprise to a twenty-first-century viewer that within this compendium of 781 photographic sequences, compiled in the midst of Jim Crow, exist six series of the mixed-race boxer Ben Bailey and five featuring a Black jockey riding a thoroughbred. This imagery, moreover, appears not in the section of “abnormal movements,” but interfiled among comparable sequences by white models.2 Gilded Age observers, however, would have been accustomed to seeing Black athletes in such noteworthy and prestigious contexts. Successful competitors achieved a measure of respect, celebrity, and even substantial incomes available to few other African Americans at the time.3 They regularly vied against their white counterparts and before mixed audiences. “In

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working with horses,” Katherine Mooney writes in Race Horse Men, “black men could gain mobility, autonomy, opportunity, even deference.” 4 Close examination of Muybridge’s portrayals of these and other AfricanAmerican models within the physical and cultural contexts of Gilded Age Philadelphia provides rare insight into the complex relationships between its Black and white residents. While to some extent Animal Locomotion manifests and legitimizes prevailing racial beliefs, as historians of photography Elspeth Brown and Shawn Michelle Smith have argued, it also furnishes an unusual vantage from which to observe the limited agency and social mobility of African-American athletes as they moved between and amidst the spaces of white Philadelphia. Representations of Black jockeys and boxers, which could alternatively sanction racial subordination or suggest AfricanAmerican equality, offer important clues for determining the precise status and position of these men within Gilded Age society.5 But I want to press further and argue that these performances and their capture on collotype plates, together with kindred images in period visual culture, are not simply records of Black mobility, both physical and social, but mechanisms by which some Black athletes could breach or circumvent (if only temporarily) barriers of segregation and prejudice. For mobility, as my co-author Tim Cresswell has characterized it, is not mere locomotion but “a thoroughly social facet of life imbued with meaning and power.”6 Peter Adey elaborates: “mobility is how geographic movement becomes entangled in the way societies and cultures assign meaning through talk, images and other representations and live out their lives. Thought about in this way, mobility changes the way we understand society, culture, politics and community; it fundamentally reimagines how we make sense of the world.”7 By this we can apprehend how the representation of Black bodies in motion, and the ability of African Americans to navigate the urban ecologies of Philadelphia, could alternatively facilitate or limit one another.

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Animal Locomotion indexed and fostered Black mobility across not just space but also social class. Participation in Muybridge’s experiments and these sports more generally placed African American athletes in elite locations and company alike. The sites where Muybridge recorded these men’s actions were among the city’s most exclusive: a racing oval in the suburb of Narberth, and a laboratory on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Throughout the postbellum era Black Philadelphians, in their fight for full and equal citizenship, more generally sought access to spaces marked not only as white but also middle or even upper class. Our protagonists’ professions, and their portrayal, could enable them to leverage skilled physical labor into middle-class respectability. At the same time, their jobs required punishing training regimens and constantly put them at the risk of serious physical injury. Only a handful realized the tantalizing promise of upward social mobility, which whites met at every turn with different forms of resistance. What I ultimately want to establish are the kinds of agency African Americans could realize through the visual culture of the Jim Crow era. First, the inherently collaborative nature of photography helps us to consider these athletes as dynamic actors in their own right, carefully attuned to the promise and perils of publicity. Second, Black activists and intellectuals regularly mobilized images in their campaigns for justice and civil rights. Over the last generation historians of photography, building on the impressive foundation laid by Deborah Willis, have demonstrated how African Americans exploited the media throughout the period in order make “claims to both economic advancement and cultural privilege,” as Shawn Michelle Smith has argued of W. E. B. Du Bois, or to “fight for social equality and national inclusion,” as Celeste-Marie Bernier and Bill E. Lawson have written of Frederick Douglass.8 Success, of course, was never guaranteed. For many white contemporaries, the performances of African-American

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athletes only confirmed longstanding stereotypes about inherent Black physicality and affinity with animals. Ben Bailey was the first African American to model for Muybridge during the photographer’s tenure at the University of Pennsylvania. When he posed on June 2, 1885, the heavyweight boxer had been prizefighting in Philadelphia for at least two years. Muybridge identified him as “a mulatto and professional pugilist,” although sports pages invariably labeled him “colored.”9 Professional boxing arose early in the city, which like New York boasted large Irish immigrant populations that dominated the sport in its early decades.10 Almost all of Bailey’s bouts took place at a boxing school at the corner of Eighth and Vine run by Irish expat and two-time lightweight champion John H. Clark and known variously as Clark’s Club or the Olympic Club.11 Muybridge’s photo shoot with Bailey, however, occurred in the courtyard of the Veterinary School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he conducted most of the stop-motion studies that would comprise Animal Locomotion. In his six sequences Bailey walks, climbs and descends stairs, heaves a seventy-five-pound rock, and pantomimes punching an invisible opponent (figure 15). Like most of Muybridge’s human models, he performs before a grid of five-centimeter squares and in the nude. The name and identity of the other African American to grace Muybridge’s compendium, by contrast, is unknown. Arrayed in jockey’s silks, this equestrian leads the thoroughbred bay mare Annie G. in a walk, a canter, and a gallop, now frozen for all time in five grids of twelve or sixteen stills (figure 16). These photographic shoots occurred not on the university campus but at the Belmont Park driving track in the suburb of Narberth, where Muybridge and his Penn assistants had hauled their arsenal of rapidshutter cameras sometime in early September of 1885 in order to capture trotters and thoroughbreds in motion. Under the leadership of stove manufacturer William McDowell, the mile loop had opened in 1876 in anticipation

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Figure 15.  Eadweard Muybridge, “Movements, Male, Striking a blow (right hand)” (detail, Animal Locomotion, Plate 344). 1887. Photomechanical collotype print, 48.5 × 62.5 cm. (19 ⅛ × 24 ⅝ in.). Photo: Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library.

of large numbers of tourists descending on Philadelphia for the city’s Centennial Exposition that summer.12 Muybridge’s tenure at Belmont Park came near the conclusion of his Penn experiments—only after he was able to finish recording animals at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden, many of whom proved unwilling sitters. The local press, who eagerly followed these unusual scientific pursuits, snickered at how “Professor Muybridge nearly swore in exasperation” at a truculent donkey and expressed “unmitigated disgust” at equally uncooperative lions.13 Transferring his bulky, nineteenth-century photographic equipment to Belmont, he must have been relieved to work with domesticated subjects trained to move in regular and predictable ways. Since his project sought to preserve only the most paradigmatic motions of animals and humans, Muybridge hoped to document “first-class trotters” and specifically requested champions like Phallas and Maud S., the later of whom had set the mile trotting record at Belmont in 1881.14 Thanks to period stud books and the sporting press, we know much more about the horse than her rider. Foaled in 1875, Annie G. was the first

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Figure 16.  Eadweard Muybridge, “Animals and Movements, Horses, Gallop; thoroughbred bay mare, Annie G.” (Animal Locomotion , Plate 626). 1887. Photomechanical collotype print, 48.5 × 62.5 cm. (19 ⅛ × 24 ⅝ in.). Photo: Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library.

filly born to Sally Travers, a dam owned and bred by J. H. and W. H. Lewis of Kentucky.15 Around 1884 one H. G. Haney purchased and began entering her in regional races with no small amount of success. Over the course of the fall 1885 season, she won at least six of nine races in a small, five-week circuit of six venues in and around Philadelphia, including two at the Belmont track on October 3. J. Howard Lewis, one of her breeders, rode her for the mile event, while her owner took the mount for the three-quarter mile.16 But the turfing career of Annie G. lasted just three seasons. By 1887 she had been sold to Bennehan Cameron of Stagville, North Carolina, at whose Fairntosh stud

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farm she birthed six progeny before her death in 1897.17 Fairntosh, which still operates today as an equestrian center, was a remnant of Cameron’s family’s massive Stagville estate, which with nearly nine hundred slaves had been one of the largest antebellum plantations in the state. Several factors clue us to the strong likelihood that Haney was a racing amateur of means dabbling in the sport, probably a local merchant or member of the professions, rather than a seasoned turfman. First, Annie G. only ever seemed to race a short distance from the city. Second, she competed at smaller tracks off the major circuits, and at events that largely featured trotters harness-racing, not thoroughbreds—precisely like the Muybridge photos of horses themselves. Above all, for these contests Haney and the breeder Lewis took the saddle rather than a professional rider. Haney, incidentally, also owned the other thoroughbred to pose before Muybridge’s lenses, the bay gelding Bouquet, whose record on the oval was briefer and less impressive. As for the Black jockey captured by instantaneous photography, Muybridge never recorded his name, just as the sporting press only took note of the identities of famous and successful jockeys riding at marquee events. He may have been her breeder J. Howard Lewis or his family member and business partner W. H., since many African Americans, as we shall see, did rise up from the very lowliest ranks of the trade to run stables and own stock. Many of these men built their careers on their successful tenures as jockeys, which might account for our anonymous protagonist’s attire. That J. Howard agreed to personally race Annie G. suggests to us that he and W. H., whether they were Black or white, must have had a relatively small operation. The rider’s uniform almost certainly rules out the likelihood that we are looking at H. G. Haney himself, and at any rate very few African Americans in Philadelphia would have had the necessary financial resources to purchase and maintain at least two thoroughbreds. Finally, it is possible that our mystery rider is an unknown professional jockey, either racing for Haney on a short-term contract, or brought to Belmont expressly for the purposes of the

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Muybridge experiments. Given the limited social mobility for African Americans in Jim Crow America, this latter scenario is the most probable.

ou t of c om pe t i t ion The photographer’s decision to visit a trotting venue rather than a thoroughbred racetrack in order to reveal the intricacies of equine locomotion is not as surprising as it might first seem. Harness racing expanded dramatically during the postwar period—the number of trotting ovals tripled from 1869 to 1875—and the decade of the 1880s was the very acme of the sport, before the debilitating Depression of 1893, which hit small-time owners and breeders especially hard.18 Since few trotters, even the most successful, could claim costly thoroughbred pedigrees, Americans far less wealthy than Leland Stanford could take part in the pastime. As author Frank Forester observed in his authoritative 1871 book Horse and Horsemanship, “Every tradesman, artisan, business man, or mechanic, whose affairs require the services of a horse, in America, keeps . . . a fast and hardy trotter,” thereby combining “profit with pleasure.”19 Indeed, many of the men responsible for hiring Muybridge were themselves avid equestrians. Professor of civil engineering and University of Pennsylvania trustee Fairman Rogers, who brought the photographer to the attention of university president William Pepper, would later author A Manual of Coaching in 1900. Only the nation’s moneyed elites, by contrast, could make the necessarily steep investments in thoroughbred stock farms: men like mining magnate George Hearst, or financier E. J. “Lucky” Baldwin. But the world of competitive trotting existed beyond the reach of African Americans. To begin with, lack of access to capital would have prevented them from owning trotters. Even when they had the requisite means, they do not appear to have been welcome to the sport. Though evidence is limited and elusive, historian Edward Hotaling has uncovered one unhappy vignette from the sporting paper Spirit of the Times, in which spectators in Hamilton, Ontario booed a Black harness driver off the track in 1866.20 And I have not

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been able to discover a single image of an African American driving in harness from this period. Few (and likely none) of the spectators at Belmont Park, furthermore, would have been African American. Just months before Muybridge’s photo shoot, the Chicago Horseman observed that the relative inaccessibility of the site augured poorly for its financial health. “The . . . inconveniences . . . of reaching the park I should judge would keep many away. After a ride by rail one is forced to journey nearly two miles by carryall [carriage] or foot to reach the destination.” Convenience aside, it would have been an unaffordable luxury for working-class Philadelphians of any color to undertake such a commute for a leisure activity.21 As we will see, African Americans were either flatly barred or more tacitly discouraged from using public transport. This was a phenomenon hardly particular to the Belmont oval. All the trotting venues in the area were sited in suburban locales, and so Philadelphia racing fans of modest means instead patronized the Gloucester thoroughbred racetrack just across the Delaware River in New Jersey.22 Visual culture offers further evidence of the segregation of harness racing. The 1870 lithograph Trotting Cracks of Philadelphia Returning from the Race at Point Breeze Park presents a brisk cavalcade whose caption identifies trotters, but not drivers (figure 17). Every figure shown, whether grasping reins or assembled on the porch of the hotel in the middle distance, is white, with one notable exception: an African American man in a bright red shirt near the print’s left margin. Positioned before a barn and holding a bucket, the lithographer codes him as a stablehand, visually isolates him from the other adults in view, and subordinates him by pairing and rhyming him with the only child in the composition. Throughout the scene the printer yokes toiling bodies to white control; the barn and the Black groom lie to the left of the inn and its white clientele, just as the (mostly dark-skinned) trotters appear to the left of their respective drivers. Only as menial laborers, then, would Black Philadelphians have been involved with the sport.

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Figure 17.  H. Pharazyn, Trotting Cracks of Philadelphia Returning from the Race at Point Breeze Park, Having a Brush Past Turner’s Hotel, Rope Ferry Road, Philadelphia. 1879. Lithograph, hand-colored, 60 × 74 cm. (23.5 × 29.25 in.). Photo: Harry T. Peters “America on Stone” Lithography Collection, Division of Cultural and Community Life, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Black prizefighters like Bailey, meanwhile, would have been relatively new to the ring in 1885. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, boxing annalist Richard Fox described “the decades between the beginning of the Civil War and 1880” as “an abyss for the African American fighter in the US.”23 Even had there been professional Black boxers active during this time, the press avoided mentioning them. African Americans only joined the sport in significant numbers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century following increased migration to cities; in Philadelphia, for example, the Black population doubled between 1880 and 1900.24 Even then, Black pugilists rarely squared off against white opponents, and white heavyweight

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Figure 18.  Eadweard Muybridge, “Movements, Male, Boxing; open hand” (Animal Locomotion, Plate 336). 1887. Photomechanical collotype print, 48.5 × 62.5 cm. (19 ⅛ × 24 ⅝ in.). Photo: Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library.

champions like John L. Sullivan and Jim Corbett refused to defend their titles against African American counterparts like Peter Jackson and George Godfrey.25 Visual culture likewise rarely depicted interracial contests. Not surprisingly, therefore, practically all of Ben Bailey’s foes were Black or mixed-race, and in Animal Locomotion he “shadow boxes alone,” as Shawn Michelle Smith notes, unlike the fourteen series of paired white boxers in the Muybridge project (figure 18).26 Of course, the exclusion of African Americans from championship bouts and trotting ovals like Belmont Park was part of a much larger pattern of segregation in the city and beyond. Although Philadelphia had boasted the

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largest Black population outside of the South since before the Civil War, there were numerous restrictions on Black life both de jure and de facto, despite the implementation of the Equal Protection Clause.27 For while the Fifteenth Amendment promised African American men the right to vote, federal troops had to mobilize to the city in 1870 to help guarantee their franchise. Then, during elections the following October, efforts to bar Black men from the polls erupted into race riots that claimed the lives of three African Americans, including educator and civil rights activist Octavius Catto. The threat of further violence likely depressed Black suffrage for years, if not decades.28 Catto had helped helm the campaign to permit Black Philadelphians on the city’s streetcars, which only triumphed in 1867 when the state—against the wishes of civic officials and white residents alike—mandated antidiscrimination in public transportation, although provisions for separate seating areas for Black and white riders tempered this victory.29 The state government’s desegregation of public schools in 1881 only impelled the flight of white students to private schools.30 Nor would African Americans have been able to attend—or even listen to lectures at—the University of Pennsylvania, where Muybridge shot the bulk of his photographs.31 Even after a Black plaintiff successfully sued a theater owner for denying him a seat, antidiscrimination laws concerning public accommodations did not pass until 1887, and even then a great many businesses continued to restrict their clientele on the basis of race without fear of enforcement. Black workers, finally, could not join the labor unions that served as gatekeepers to the skilled trades.32 Still, as in practically all American metropoles, residential segregation in Philadelphia would become most pronounced only over the course of the early twentieth century. During the Gilded Age, while African Americans were indeed concentrated into particular neighborhoods, all of the city’s political wards both had Black residents and were majority white.33 That is,

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Black and white Philadelphians lived in relative proximity, but they rarely mingled socially or worked alongside one another.

m i x e d pe r f or m a nc e s And yet, prizefighters often violated the color line. The professionalization of boxing over the 1880s transformed it into of “one of America’s most popular spectator sports,” according to historian Elliott Gorn, and “interest in pugilism leaped the old barriers of class and ethnicity.”34 Because boxing did not require much physical space, it flourished in the working class neighborhoods where most African Americans lived.35 We cannot definitely say whether a venue like Clark’s Club would have permitted mixed audiences, but an evening’s slate of contests often listed both Black and white fighters, even as individual competitions remained largely segregated. Mixed matches did sometimes occur, as when Bailey took on white Canadian pugilist Mike Boden in March 1890.36 Prizefighting advocate and National Police Gazette editor Richard Fox repeatedly demanded in print that Black boxing champion Peter Jackson have a shot at the heavyweight championship, and Jackson did eventually fight Jim Corbett—though not for the title—to a sixty-one-round draw in 1891.37 Some segments of horseracing were another notable, if qualified, exception to these rules of the color line, both in the stands and on the oval. Unlike harness racing, “thoroughbred racing,” writes historian Steven Riess, “was a rare sport that was trendy with both the social and economic elites and the lower classes,” and this latter clientele included large numbers of African Americans.38 Indeed, horserace coverage appeared in local newspapers across varied readerships: alongside chess columns in the upmarket Philadelphia Times, in the working-class Record, and on the sporting page of the Tribune, still today the oldest continually active Black paper. Within national publications, turf reports graced both the down-market National Police Gazette and the posh Spirit of the Times. Poorer track enthusiasts, naturally, would not have

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rubbed shoulders with their tonier counterparts, and generally observed races from elevated vantages outside the park gates, such as Dead Head Hill near the Jerome Park racetrack in the Bronx, then host of the Belmont Stakes.39 In addition, the gambling underworld that shadowed the sport, despite the ever proliferating roster of vice laws, was “the most racially integrated milieu in late nineteenth century America,” according to historian Roger Lane.40 As for race participants, horseracing was, along with prizefighting, one of only two professional sports in which African Americans could compete in Philadelphia; unlike in other American cities, major league baseball teams in the city excluded Black men from the field.41 Poring over census data, economists Debra Barbezat and James Hughes have recently revealed that African Americans were overrepresented in the trade. In 1880, for example, they constituted 13 percent of the general population but 22 percent of jockeys, and this is likely a low estimate since the census has historically undercounted Black populations.42 All these circumstances help explain why the only African Americans found in Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion were athletes who participated in the few (partly) integrated professional sports. These stop-motion photographs, furthermore, reveal the ways in which Black sportsmen could, at least within the context of their profession, cross the many color lines that divided Philadelphia and the nation at large. For while Bailey spars alone, Muybridge has not segregated him from his white counterparts, all equally frozen in time. Since the photographer organized the volumes by type of locomotive action, the series with Bailey appear amidst those showing white men performing like actions, whether in the introductory sequences (walking and climbing stairs), or in the sporting sequences (hefting and boxing). In like manner, the photographer has not cordoned the rider of Annie G. off from the other riders, but rather inserts him at three different points in the section devoted to racehorses: within the subsections of equines walking, cantering, and galloping.

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Figure 19.  Currier & Ives, Celebrated Winning Horses and Jockeys of the American Turf. 1889. Lithograph, 51.3 × 86.6 cm. (20 ³∕16 × 34 ⅛ in.). Photo: Popular Graphic Arts Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Even a cursory search of period turfing imagery quickly reveals Black and white jockeys freely mingling. The 1889 Currier & Ives print Celebrated Winning Horses and Jockeys of the American Turf (figure 19) presents no less than three Black champions: Tony Hamilton, fourth from the right; Isaac Murphy, near the middle and with his back to us; and Shelby “Pike” Barnes, showcased front and center as the winner of the first Great Futurity Stakes of 1888. And, in a group photo of riders at an 1891 Coney Island event, where Murphy kneels at center right in front of Hamilton, Black and white competitors pose next to and even touch one another in familiar camaraderie.43 Other Gilded-Age visual culture comparably features heroic Black fighters and mixed sporting contests. Lightweight champion Billy Edwards’s 1895 volume Gladiators of the Prize Ring, for example, includes seven Black champions in his gallery of seventy-seven notables.44 An illustration for the June 20, 1885 issue of the National Police Gazette (published the same month

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Figure 20.  George Dixon, A Lesson in Boxing (n.p., 1893), 10–11. Photo: Library of Congress.

as Bailey’s photo shoot) shows a “colored pugilist” delivering a decisive blow to a white opponent. Three of the twenty-five boxing trading cards issued by the Pierre Lorillard Tobacco Company during this time featured interracial standoffs.45 And in 1893 featherweight champion George Dixon published the remarkable instructional pamphlet “A Lesson in Boxing” (figure 20), which incorporates photographs of him sparring with a white opponent.

“a w h i t e c ol or e d m a n” The very presence of these Black athletes in Animal Locomotion, moreover, suggests that the photographer, his handlers, and local sporting circles held them in some measure of esteem. As I emphasized at the outset, Muybridge

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explicitly indicated in his prospectus that he had chosen his athletic models because “each . . . has a well-earned record in the particular feat selected for illustration.” 46 And indeed, 1885 had been a banner year for Bailey. That March he defeated Toby Brown, “the champion colored boxer of Baltimore,” and by April had secured the Black heavyweight title in Pennsylvania.47 In an 1885 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Muybridge similarly proclaimed his intent “to secure negatives of first-class trotters . . . and fine horses, none other.” 48 As her triumphant 1885 season testifies, Annie G. was precisely the kind of top-notch racehorse Muybridge hoped to memorialize in print. Indeed, the talents of Bailey and our anonymous rider must have outweighed the very real pressures of racial segregation in order to justify their appearances, respectively, on a campus that prohibited Black students and at an exclusive driving club deep in the leafy and lily-white suburbs of Philadelphia. Animal Locomotion patently attests to these individuals’ skill and accomplishment, especially when compared to the white amateurs who also haunt the archive. Plate 311 in particular showcases the pugilist’s muscular prowess (figure 21). While Bailey easily heaves a seventy-five-pound stone with one hand, the white and mustached model in the subsequent series struggles to do the same with two (figure 22). Likewise, the Black equestrian’s uniform broadcasts his professional status, in contrast to the street clothes worn by the rider of the other thoroughbred present at Belmont, Daisy (figure 23). Examine too the posture of the riders of Daisy and Annie G. at full gallop; while the former hunches awkwardly, lumbers forward more erratically, and thrashes wildly with a whip, the latter hums along poised and erect, bobbing only slightly up and down in the saddle as though floating. The man atop Annie G. (figure 24) also demonstrates his expertise in the pages of Animal Locomotion through his style of riding. Situated higher and further forward than his counterpart on Daisy, his stance is a modified example of the “forward seat.” By shortening the stirrups, positioning

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Figures 21 and 22.  Eadweard Muybridge, “Movements, Male, Heaving a 75-lb. rock” (detail, Animal Locomotion, Plate 311 [above] and 312 [below]). 1887. Photomechanical collotype print, 48.5 × 62.5 cm. (19 ⅛ × 24 ⅝ in.). Photo: Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library.

himself closer to the withers, and leaning forward, he keeps his weight above the horse’s center of gravity in order to maximize speed and maneuverability. Turf historians generally credit the legendary African American Triple-Crown jockey Willie Simms with introducing British audiences to a manner of riding they found so unusual that it quickly became known as the “American seat.” Not just Simms but also Isaac Murphy and many other Black riders pioneered the forward seat, which some scholars attribute to the

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Figure 23.  Eadweard Muybridge, “Animals and Movements, Horses, Gallop; bay horse, Daisy” (Animal Locomotion, Plate 628). 1887. Photomechanical collotype print, 48.5 × 62.5 cm. (19 ⅛ × 24 ⅝ in.). Photo: Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library.

practices of Black exercise boys who often warmed up mounts without any equipment. This revolution in carriage may well have been at least partly responsible for the striking successes of African American jockeys in the Gilded Age.49 Muybridge’s depiction of this Black equestrian astride his mount also departs from the conventional portrayal of his brethren in salon painting— and not merely because of the difference in media and the emphasis on movement in Animal Locomotion. The oeuvre of Edward Troye, who served as court painter to the larger breeding enterprises in Kentucky until his death in 1874, contrasts instructively. In tableaux like The Undefeated Asteroid (1864; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), the artist augments the esteem and value of the champion thoroughbred by including three enslaved and deferential

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Figure 24.  Eadweard Muybridge, “Animals and Movements, Horses, Gallop; thoroughbred bay mare, Annie G.” (detail, Animal Locomotion, Plate 626). 1887. Photomechanical collotype print, 48.5 × 62.5 cm. (19 ⅛ × 24 ⅝ in.). Photo: Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library.

attendants: an unnamed groom grips the reins with both hands, jockey “Brown Dick” crouches to adjust his spurs, and trainer “Ansel” hoists a saddle. Unlike the rider of Annie G., jockeys in Troye canvases seldom pose mounted. Practically speaking, this arrangement better spotlights the silhouette and musculature of the equine, but it also effectively renders Brown Dick a passive accessory incidental to the animal’s achievements. Curled into a ball and tucked into the corner of the painting, he has no opportunity to exhibit the expertise shown by the jockey at Belmont.50 Afforded the chance to vie against white athletes, Black jockeys indeed proved their mettle time and time again. Thirteen of the fifteen riders at the inaugural Kentucky Derby were African American, and they won fourteen of its twenty-four meetings during the nineteenth century.51 The racing press, at least, quickly recognized and lauded their talents. Responding to a Harper’s Weekly article, the Spirit of the Times in 1887 forcefully refuted the contention that Black riders no longer played a significant role in the sport. “The colored jockeys have fully held their own and a little more. Indeed, they have almost monopolized the best mounts, and have been singularly successful. . . . Once . . . Murphy, West, or Hamilton has been substituted in the saddle for some other jockey . . . so quickly do the odds tumble. . . . It furnishes a striking commentary on the skill or integrity of the best of the colored jockeys.”52

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No individual better demonstrated the excellence of African American jockeys than Isaac Murphy, whom Arthur Ashe considered “the greatest black athlete of the nineteenth century.”53 A three-time Kentucky Derby champion, Murphy clinched more than four hundred contests over the course of a fifteen-year career, and at a winning percentage twice that of the other top jockeys.54 Sports reporters repeatedly expressed their great respect. “Murphy is one of the best jockeys in America,” rhapsodized the Spirit of the Times early in his career. “He is very observant. . . . During the progress of a race he keeps a sharp lookout for danger, is quick to perceive the weak points of an adversary, and prompt to take advantage of them. He has a steady hand, a quick eye, and a bold heart.” One Chicago Tribune journalist was simply smitten: “The newspaper man gazed admiringly on the trimly built negro who could speak so complacently about earning a thousand dollars in one afternoon.”55 Race fans across the color and class spectrum also cheered his exploits, as evidenced by Spirit of the Times’s coverage of one Coney Island contest: “As the imperturbable Isaac Murphy, sitting well down in his saddle and straight as a dart, cantered the chestnut down past the stand to the starting point, the pair looked the idealization of horse and jockey. The crowd seemed to recognize the fact, and round after round of applause came from the masses of people.”56 In Animal Locomotion, the jockey’s uniform and his proficiency in the saddle both create the vision of a consummate professional. Working as a jockey, moreover, meant the genuine possibility of career advancement. Time spent in silks was sometimes only one plot point on a long vocational trajectory that began in childhood: from groom, to exercise boy, to jockey, to stable foreman, to trainer, and even to owner of stock. Written in the twilight of the nineteenth-century black jockey, Lyman Horace Weeks’s 1898 encyclopedic The American Turf enumerates a score of African American turfmen who undertook the remarkable journey from stablehand to small capitalist. Born into slavery in Richmond in 1850, for example, Albert Cooper (figure 25)

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Figure 25.  “Albert Cooper,” from Lyman Horace Weeks, ed., The American Turf: An Historical Account of Racing in the United States, with Biographical Sketches of Turf Celebrities (New York: The Historical Company, 1898), 356. Photo: Library of Congress.

quickly rose to the rank of “trainers of the first class,” worked for major owner-breeders like George Hearst, Lucky Baldwin, and James Haggin, and even owned and operated his own stable of thoroughbreds. Or, writing of William N. Cloyd, Weeks offered these accolades for a man only thirty years of age: “Among the practical men in the racing world who have won their

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way from a place in the stable to the rank of owners there is probably none who is better spoken of by all classes of turfmen or whose career has been based on a more thorough knowledge of thoroughbred horseflesh.”57 Muybridge similarly ennobled Ben Bailey by identifying him as “professional pugilist” in his prospectus. This designation not only communicated his aptitude but also disassociated him from the naked commercialism inherent in the epithet “prizefighter.” To this end many boxers pursued such an identity as a respectable professional. Seasoned fighters often made use of the honorific “Professor,” and a few African American champions like John Bailey (no relation, to my knowledge) ran successful boxing academies following retirement from the ring.58 This sporting entrepreneur earned a place as the subject of an 1870 print (figure 26) that portrays him in a gym whose numerous gloves and club weights hint at a large student body. A few black fighters even held teaching posts at universities, such as Harvard’s Director of Physical Education and Culture Aaron Molineaux Hewlett and Clemson’s Andy Watson.59 Earning $200 a month, pugilist Peter Jackson was the highest-paid instructor in any field at the private California Athletic Club in San Francisco.60 And just as Dixon’s instructional booklet would have helped him secure white-collar status, Ben Bailey could, in the pages of Animal Locomotion and on the grounds of an institution of higher education, play the role of an expert sparring instructor. Significantly, he appears not in the subsection devoted to tradesmen like blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, and farmers enacting assorted occupational tasks, but in the company of the university faculty, staff, and students who demonstrate athletic and more quotidian activities, from fencing to somersaulting to walking. Bailey’s lighter skin color and status as a “mulatto,” as Muybridge termed him, may also have helped to assure his presence in Animal Locomotion. Census-takers identified one-third of all Philadelphians of African descent as “mulatto” in 1860, and in the aggregate these mixed-race individuals experienced several advantages over their “Black” counterparts, including

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Figure 26.  A. Trochsler & Co., John B. Bailey, Professor of Sparring and Gymnastics, 1870. Print, 20 ½ × 13 ⅞ in. Photo: Popular Graphic Arts Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

greater occupational differentiation, literacy rates, and household wealth. Historians Theodore Hershberg and Henry Williams’ hypothesis that “whites, mulattoes, and blacks might well have preferred mulattoes to blacks when it came time to pay for their goods or services” may also have applied to Bailey’s enlistment into Muybridge’s archive.61

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The photographer’s inclusion of a specifically light-skinned Black boxer, furthermore, might have contested period racist discourse. Shawn Michelle Smith has argued that W. E. B. Du Bois tactically deployed biracial sitters in a compendium of portraits of African Americans that he compiled for an exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. “The figure of the biracial individual or so-called mulatto,” she writes, “became an important site through which to challenge eugenicist claims about essential racial differences and inferiority. If one could demonstrate that there was nothing degenerate about the biracial individual, one might also suggest that the different races were not so terribly distinct.”62 At the same time, the sporting press never seemed to distinguish between African American fighters of varying skin tones. At any rate, these sports represented some of the few opportunities for social mobility available to African Americans in Jim Crow America.63 Barred from most skilled trades, eighty percent of employed Black men in Philadelphia in 1860 toiled at unskilled labor.64 Others were able to maintain a foothold in skilled professions that had long been associated with Black servitude, such as barbers, butchers, caterers, tailors, coachmen, and porters.65 To many white Americans these jobs might have seemed too obsequious or servile, but they provided a stable middle-class livelihood for many African Americans in the late nineteenth century. Particularly talented African American athletes could become affluent. Featherweight champion George Dixon claimed “more than one hundred thousand dollars in stakes, purses, and gate receipts” over the course of his career.66 While Bailey never realized such impressive gains, he often competed for purses as large as $300 that amounted to several months’ wages of unskilled work.67 At the height of his career in the late 1880s, Isaac Murphy was likely the highest-paid rider in America and, adjusting for inflation, the equivalent of a multimillionaire. His excellent track record allowed him to negotiate generous contracts, and in time he came to own a lavish home, real estate holdings, and several horses. He even employed his own valet.68 Of

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course, only a select few translated tenure in the ring or on the oval into a lucrative business career, and the odds are that Bailey and the man riding Annie G. never reaped such gains. When given the opportunity to present themselves to the larger public, Black athletes consistently signaled these ambitions for higher status. The large cover photograph of “A Lesson in Boxing,” for example, presents fighter George Dixon posed in crisp formal attire and with an easy gentility. Or, in 1884, Harper’s New Monthly recounted the life story of Charles Stewart, who as a slave climbed from groom at the age of twelve to overseer of a stock farm supervising some forty men and boys; tellingly, for his interview, Stewart changed out of work clothes to dress the part of the gentleman, complete with waistcoat, frock coat, velveteen trousers, and cravat, even despite the hot June weather.69 The portraits of African American professionals that fill the pages of Weeks’s American Turf equally reveal men intent on creating an aura of elegance and achievement. With his trim beard, pocket square, and horseshoe pin, Albert Cooper’s portrait immortalizes him as a sober and cultivated citizen (figure 25). These pictorial strategies are frequent in nineteenth-century photographic portrayals of African Americans. Luminaries from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois communicated respectability through bearing and dress in individual daguerreotype portraits as well as portfolios of the “Talented Tenth” like Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U. S. A.70 Class and refinement are much more than a matter of dress, of course, and countless press notices attested to the noble character of Black fighters at the top of their game. As James Weldon Johnson noted of heavyweight Peter Jackson, “his chivalry in the ring was so great that sports-writers down to today apply to him the doubtful compliment ‘a white colored man.’ ”71 For others, this ability to climb socially through athletic achievement represented a threat to prevailing hierarchies of class and race. As early as 1820, Philadelphian Robert Waln had groused that boxing “elevates the

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coal-heaver, the publican, and porter or the negro—who happens to possess muscular strength, large bones, and a thick skull—into the society of rank and fashion.”72 So too did Black equestrians carefully tailor impeccable reputations. “In the matter of honesty and integrity,” wrote the Spirit of the Times in 1887, “colored riders generally rank with the trusted of their white-skinned brethren. Quite a number of them are absolutely above suspicion.”73 Here too Isaac Murphy was the paragon. Nicknamed the “Black Englishman” for his decorum, he was, in the words of John Davis’s American Turf of 1907, “noted for his honesty. . . . He was Black of skin, but his heart was as white as snow.” The Spirit of the Times, meanwhile, was quick to point out that Murphy’s success did not come at the expense of his virtue: “I have seen men with valets—white men at that—who could hardly claim more gentlemanly pretensions than this same Isaac Murphy. Well-behaved, courteous, decorous, without a suggestion of the uncouth or depraved rough, he invites and deserves the esteem and good-will of all.”74 The upmarket status of the periodical that issued this endorsement would only have enhanced its value for the jockey. Professional male athletes from the period also deliberately evoked antiquity in order to ennoble their pursuits. “Photography became the means through which modern men could represent themselves as the unashamed equals of ancient athletes,” writes art historian Tamar Garb of period physical culture imagery. “The Classical veil also seemed to confer a certain respectability on what otherwise might have seemed a scandalous display of male flesh.”75 White competitors, including champion wrestler William Muldoon, prizefighter John Sullivan, and bodybuilder Eugen Sandow often posed as iconic classic statuary or in antique dress for publicity photos. That their pursuits had all once been Greek Olympic sports surely abetted this classicizing impulse.76 John Boyle O’Reilly’s inclusion of a reproduction of John Donoghue’s full-length portrait sculpture of John Sullivan, The Boxer

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Figure 27.  John Boyle O’Reilly, Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (Boston: Pilot Publishing Company, 1888), frontispiece. Photo: Library of Congress.

(1887), as the frontispiece of his 1888 exercise treatise The Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport is an exemplary case study (figure 27). In his brief on the statue, O’Reilly productively weds athletic and artistic achievement in order to extol the champion: “Look at the statue; that is Sullivan, life, body, and spirit. . . . Marvelous trunk and herculean arms . . . buttressed, Samson

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neck . . . the head—large, round, as a Greek’s. . . . America is enriched with a work of art that would have won a crown in Periclesian Athens.”77 Athletic prowess, then, could elevate competitors to the Olympian heights of a period masculine ideal, and at times African Americans too attained this exalted realm. In the 1884 book Famous American Jockeys, W. S. Vosburgh acclaimed champion rider Isaac Murphy as “beyond reproach [and] . . . an elegant specimen of manhood, strong, muscular, and as graceful as an Apollo.”78 The previous year, the Cincinnati Enquirer had lauded the fighter “Black Diamond” Harry Woodson by comparing him to the very acme of the sculptor’s art: “his neck was firmly set and as finely proportioned as the Apollo Belvedere.”79 This commentary strikingly aligned a Black boxer with an artwork that had not only embodied aesthetic perfection since Johann Joachim Winckelmann touted its “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” in 1755, but also had served as a key metric of alleged white superiority for decades.80 Most remarkably, Black boxer Peter Jackson, in the eyes of some of his white contemporaries, represented the nearest latter-day embodiment of the Apollo Belvedere, even more so than his white counterparts. On the occasion of Eugen Sandow’s visit to San Francisco, the Examiner in May 1894 published commentary from four local artists on whether or not the bodybuilder indeed epitomized “the Perfect Man.” As the piece’s subtitle intimated—“an excellent and wonderful anatomical chart, but not a beautiful, artistic model”—all of them found Sandow an impressive muscular specimen but not the archetype of male physicality. Instead, two of them proposed the boxing instructor at the California Athletic Club as a more suitable candidate. “Better is the figure of Peter Jackson,” averred Amédée Joullin, “who might seriously be considered as a perfect man, or nearly perfect. The lines are fine and delicate from the wrists to the small ankles.” John A. Stanton concurred: “Peter Jackson to my mind approaches nearer the elegant proportions of the old Greek statues than Sandow. The lines of his

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Figure 28.  “Sandow, the Imperfect Man,” San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1894, 24. Photo: Mount Holyoke College. The Three Types of Manly Form. (Jackson and Sandow, from photographs by Taber).

contour are more finely drawn, more delicate than those of Sandow.” The accompanying illustration by “Langford” (figure 28), based on unlocated photographs by Isaiah West Taber, certifies how Jackson’s lither physiognomy more closely approximated the Apollo Belvedere’s than that of the white strongman, who intentionally models here as the Farnese Hercules.81 Muybridge and his Penn collaborators must have considered Bailey similarly refined to include him in the stop-motion archive. As the photographer disclosed in an interview with the Philadelphia Times, “I have experienced a great deal of difficulty in securing proper models. . . . artists’ models, as a rule, are ignorant and not well bred. As a consequence their movements are

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not graceful, and it is essential for the thorough execution of my work to have my models of a graceful bearing.”82 By appearing amidst the other male nudes that initiative the archive, the pugilist joins an otherwise white fraternity whose toned and disciplined bodies evoke a classical gymnasium. Nor was this the only time he soared to such lofty aesthetic heights. Just a week after posing for Muybridge, the Spirit of the Times reported, somewhat ambiguously, that “Ben Baily [sic], the colored boxer, is posing as a statuette in Philadelphia.”83 A successful boxing career could, therefore, not only “elevate . . . the negro . . . into the society of rank and fashion” and transform him into “a white colored man,” but also mount a formidable attack on period racism. Through his victory over white fighter Jack Skelly for the featherweight championship in New Orleans in 1892, George Dixon, in the words of the African American newspaper the Cleveland Gazette, “has given a favorite Dixie prejudice a terrible black eye.”84 No wonder, then, that none other than Frederick Douglass hung in his parlor a portrait of Peter Jackson to which, according to James Weldon Johnson, “he used to point . . . and say, ‘Peter is doing a great deal with fists to solve the Negro question.’ ”85 One episode involving Isaac Murphy illustrates just how much some white Americans in the Gilded Age were willing to accept, celebrate, and even identify with Black sportsmen. After a thrilling victory in the summer of 1890 at the Sheepshead Bay track—the first, as it happens, recorded by photo finish—Murphy became the subject of a poem by popular author Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “How Salvator Won.”86 As its opening stanza demonstrates, Wilcox actually and remarkably narrated the episode from Murphy’s perspective: The gate was thrown open, I rode out alone, More proud than a monarch who sits upon a throne. I am but a jockey, but shout upon shout Went up from the people who watched me ride out.

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And the cheers that rang forth from that warm-hearted crowd Were as earnest as those to which monarch e’er bowed.87

That a white woman could imagine herself as a Black man at the very height of the Jim Crow era persuasively testifies to the sport’s potential to breach and even topple barriers of prejudice and segregation.

“t h e nat iona l de f e c t s of h i s r ac e” But the dark insinuations of racist caricature constantly shadowed even the most respected African American athletes. In late-nineteenth-century visual culture, the antithesis of the Black gentleman was the coon, a villainous rogue defined by his immoderation, depravity, and brutality.88 Ever sensitive to the vagaries of public taste, print manufacturers Currier and Ives sold depictions of this ignoble character alongside their portfolios of heroic, championship sportsmen. Satiric but with biting undertones, the 1892 lithograph A Darktown Race—Facing the Flag (figure 29) stars types representative of the enduringly popular Darktown Series.89 On the one hand, their attempt to stage a horserace and the bright colors and discordant patterns of their flashy attire betoken clumsy pretentions to good taste. On the other, numerous clues betray their limited resources, and thus, indulgence beyond their means: ragged shoes, a tattered starter’s flag, ill-fitting clothing, and a ramshackle grandstand. The pitiful condition of their mounts and their ferocious riding implements—a fireplace poker and a baseball bat—imply vicious character. Equally loathsome parodies in the Currier and Ives catalog like Polished Off. “Golly—he’s licked!!” (1888) lampooned Black boxers to similar effect.90 These stereotypes even pursued fighters like Bailey into the ring. In April 1885, John Clark organized at his boxing club (which Bailey frequented) a week of variety shows with the “latest songs, dances, and sketches, interlarded with boxing bouts.” Each program, according to Sporting Life, opened with “a female minstrel scene.”91 Black fighters regularly endured nasty, rac-

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Figure 29.  Currier & Ives, A Darktown Race—Facing the Flag, 1892. Lithograph, handcolored, 32.5 × 42.5 cm. (12.75 × 16.75 in). Photo: Popular Graphic Arts Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

ist verbal abuse from spectators.92 Nor were period publications innocent of stereotype; the San Francisco Examiner artist who illustrated an 1897 fight between George Dixon and Dal Watkins in the curious form of a kinetoscope disc, for instance, succumbed to period conventions and darkened and caricatured the facial features of the Black champion.93 And while we have no direct evidence of Muybridge’s attitudes towards people of African descent, the photographer too personally trucked in such repulsive imagery. Amidst his papers at the University of Pennsylvania are twelve zoetrope strips manufactured by Milton Bradley, most of which contain lurid racial stereotypes (figure 30). Photo historians Elspeth Brown and Shawn Michelle Smith have maintained that elements of Animal Locomotion clearly betray its endorsement of

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Figure 30.  Milton Bradley, Hash Machine, c. 1880. Color zoetrope strip, 8.7 × 91.3 cm. (3.5 × 36 in.). Photo: Eadweard Muybridge Collection, University of Pennsylvania Archives.

prevailing scientific theories of racial difference and hierarchy. In particular, Marta Braun’s archival inquiries have divulged that Muybridge’s June 1885 session with Bailey marked the debut of gridded backgrounds in the photographer’s studio in Penn’s Veterinary Department; throughout the California phase of his instantaneous experiments and during his initial tenure at Penn, the photographer had used monotone or vertically ruled backdrops.94 These visual metrics had initially appeared in anthropometric studies, such as the work of ethnologist J. H. Lamprey (figure 9), that sought to type and rank various racial and ethnic groups. Even more, the University of Philadelphia was an early hotbed of Spencerian race science. For example, one of the members of Muybridge’s supervising committee, Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Zoology Harrison Allen, undertook studies of crania in order to corroborate the white supremacist assumptions of period physical anthropology.95 As I have tried to argue, however, Bailey appears in the Muybridge archive as much a member of Penn’s amateur athletic fraternity as a physiognomic deviant. Dr. Allen’s take on this corpus of photographs offers further evidence that the heavyweight boxer managed to defy overt typecasting. When the anatomist endeavored to make the case that “the motions of the hands and feet [of the human subject] are essentially those of the quadruped,” he might easily have followed precedent and seized upon the pugilist as his case study, since Spencerians deemed African Americans less evolved from animals. And yet he illustrated his claims not with Bailey but with “model 39”

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from series 258—the very white man who hurled a boulder with less ease than the prizefighter (figure 22). Allen’s discussion referenced four additional white models (in series 69 and 333) before taking up Bailey and a white acrobat (series 311, 312, 322, 323). That is, for the anatomist, Black and white men (Bailey and model 39) equally demonstrate how “the attitude taken by the human fore limb is precisely that of the fore limb of the quadruped.”96 This is not to claim that Black athletes—in Animal Locomotion and beyond—entirely eluded period typecasting. In particular, African Americans in the ring risked validating canards about Black propensity for savagery and violence. Accordingly, many leading Black pugilists adopted more defensive techniques to avoid allegations of aggressivity. “Most black men of the period were taught to hold back and camouflage their normal masculine assertiveness,” writes Peter Jackson’s biographer. “Jackson typically assumed a defensive style in his fighting and was careful not to dole out undue punishment to white fighters.”97 And note how George Dixon specifically characterized his instructional manual as “a manual of self-defense.”98 But Muybridge’s treatment of Bailey, by contrast, accents his intensity (figure 31). Since he takes up a larger proportion of the frame and extends his punches further than the white fighters sparring elsewhere in the portfolio (figure 18), the Black boxer becomes a more ferocious presence. But most of all, Bailey’s large frame and bulging muscles might have exceeded period conceptions about the ideal male body. Since the

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Figure 31.  Eadweard Muybridge, “Movements, Male, Striking a blow (right hand)” (Animal Locomotion, Plate 344). 1887. Photomechanical collotype print, 48.5 × 62.5 cm. (19 ⅛ × 24 ⅝ in.). Photo: Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library.

eighteenth century, writes art historian Alex Potts, “the image that functioned as the epitome of ideal manhood was not a muscular, solidly virile bruiser like the Farnese Hercules, but . . . the Apollo Belvedere.”99 The physical culture literature of the Gilded Age consistently drew this precise distinction; Army Major John Brooke, for instance, favored gymnastic training that produced a “Belvedere Apollo” rather than a “Farnese Hercules.”100 As the San Francisco artists’ discussion of Sandow revealed, sheer bulk seemed to many inelegant and unattractive: Evelyn McCormick deemed him “a model of strength, not refinement;” Amédée Joullin disdained his “unsightly bundles of muscle;” and John Stanton maintained that his “cultivation of the muscles . . . has developed him into a squatty, muscular monstrosity” (figure 28). Likewise, in his boxing treatise John O’Reilly was careful to describe Sullivan’s sculpted likeness (figure 27) as “not twisted and hardened into foolish lumps of dry muscle, but soft and lissome as the leg of a tiger.”101 Physical culture experts, furthermore, aligned these physiognomic distinctions with differences in social class, as when college gymnastics instructor Dudley Allen Sargent “argued that manual labor led to overdeveloped, inferior muscles.”102 In this spirit, physician, professional sculptor, and

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Figure 32.  Thomas Nast, “Education: Is There No Middle Course?” Harper’s Weekly 23:1183 (August 30, 1879), 696. Photo: HathiTrust Digital Library.

physical fitness pioneer R. Tait McKenzie asserted in his manifesto “Building the Physical Side of College Men” that the chief goal of the Department of Physical Education which he directed at the University of Pennsylvania was the promotion of “a strong, healthy, symmetrical body for the mass of our students . . . with athletics as a secondary matter.”103 Published in Harper’s Weekly in 1879, the Thomas Nast cartoon “Education: Is There No Middle Course?” (figure 32) nicely encapsulates this impulse to produce well-rounded students through comical caricatures that epitomize the two extremes: a gaunt, spindly, and macrocephalic bookworm at left, and a hulking, thuggish lowbrow at

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right who, not coincidentally, clenches his fists for sparring.104 Thus Bailey’s endomorphic body type (figure 15) might have rendered him more base and brutish in the eyes of contemporaries. These same stereotypes swirled around professional Black riders as well, and in often surprising ways. Another, early name for the “American seat” brought to the sport by African American jockeys bore sharply racist associations: “monkey seat.” Silks classified jockeys as professionals, but they also labeled them as employees of stable owners and, for Black riders, recalled the distinctly colored livery of the antebellum era that marked slaves as property and décor. For some in the trotting community, furthermore, thoroughbred racing, in which men like Isaac Murphy excelled, represented a less genteel and more primitive pursuit, since by their logic a galloping horse ran in its natural gait while trotting require more extensive conditioning.105 Thus the spotless public reputations that leading African American jockeys cultivated arose out of unfortunate necessity. The story of Tony Hamilton offers an instructive lesson in the extra scrutiny faced by Black competitors. After an erratic performance by the race favorite at Brighton Beach in July 1890, many observers instantly suspected that Hamilton had intentionally thrown the match. The recently established Jockey Club quickly suspended him, even though the four other favorites who lost that day escaped censure. The national press was equally hasty to condemn Hamilton; the New York Times impugned him as an “ignorant, muckle-headed negro” whose failings owed “to the too free use of opium, to overindulgence of gin, and to downright rascality.” After a formal hearing Hamilton was exonerated and the decision overturned, but the Times never printed an apology.106 Generally speaking, however, the most noxious critiques of Black jockeys came from beyond the world of horseracing, where white Americans were less familiar with their achievements and character.107 The loudest denunciations of Hamilton came from the New York Times rather than industry publications.

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Frank Forester’s advice on the selection of grooms in Horse and Horsemanship further illuminates period racial typecasting. “The negro,” he declared, “makes in some respects, a good stable servant,” though the author was quick to summon the dark figure of the coon: “He will probably not be free from the national defects of his race; he will, likely enough, be lazy if not looked closely after, will lie a good deal, do some small pilfering, and, now and then, get drunk.” Having catalogued predilections for vice, Forester then enumerated the inherent virtues of a Black stablehand: “he habitually loves the horse, and is proud of his appearance; and will, perhaps, work more faithfully on him than on any thing else. He is almost invariably good-natured, and I have observed that horses become more attached to negroes than to any other servants.”108 Given prevailing assumptions that African Americans were closer in character to animals, the author tars his subject with the brush of stereotype. The demonstrable achievements of Black jockeys, of course, owed not to some innate and intuitive bond with animals but to hard-won discipline and sacrifice. Annie G.’s rider’s fluid and aerodynamic silhouette, accentuated by the sharp contrast of his dark attire against the white backdrop, came at a steep price (figure 24). This trim physiognomy, which becomes yet more apparent in comparison to Daisy’s rider (figure 23), depended on starvation dieting and “sweating” out water weight throughout the racing season. Murphy attested how he had “to keep constantly reducing his flesh by artificial means from the 1st of May until the 1st of October. It is a tremendous strain on the mental and nervous system as well as the physical. There is a constant feeling of weakness and sickness.” Tony Hamilton affirmed that “I have been so weak at times from reducing that I could scarcely stand. . . . In reducing I walk with sweaters on sometimes as much as ten miles a day, and all this, too, on an empty stomach. We earn our salaries.”109 In the antebellum era stable owners even buried enslaved jockeys up to their necks in piles of manure that naturally generated enough heat to induce weight loss from perspiration.110

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All these punishing measures ensured the gaunt bodies that populate turfing imagery (figure 19). Murphy’s interlocutor in the Kansas City Star grimly observed how “the high cheek bones with the skin drawn tightly over them [told] their own story of self-imposed starvation,” and publicity photos of athletes confirm this diagnosis. Spirit of the Times specifically attributed disease and even death among jockeys to “the direful results of the ‘wasting’ process.” “More than any other class of individuals connected with racing,” Lyman Weeks observed at the end of the century, “the jockeys have only a short day. The exactions of their work have a tendency to wear them out.”111 Even more, the need to keep riders light often meant that mere adolescents competed in the saddle, which in turn produced a more dan gerous field; as Murphy argued, “it almost kills a man to get down to the weights . . . [and] it puts all the riding in the hands of a lot of little boys, and they ride wild.”112 For all these reasons, many jockeys urged American racetracks (unsuccessfully) to adopt the more humane English scale of riding weights, which averaged some eight to ten pounds heavier. African Americans’ attraction to pugilism similarly had less to do with instinct than economics, since, as sports historian Steven Riess notes, “only young men from the poorest neighborhoods chose to become prizefighters because it required intensive training and certain physical punishment.”113 Boxing, like horseracing, was an indisputably hazardous trade. The gradual transition from bare-knuckle to gloved fights over the 1880s may have helped make the sport appear less vicious to observers, but it remained no less dangerous, and throughout the nineteenth century boxers averaged a mere forty-five-year lifespan.114 The sporting press eagerly captured the brutality of many contests, as when the National Police Gazette, on the occasion of Dixon’s victory over Skelly, described “the ugly half-splashing sound as his blood-soaked gloves again and again visited the bleeding wounds that had drenched them.”115 One article covering Bailey’s match against the Washington, DC fighter Domino in December 1886 likewise enumerated it

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among “a Week of Desperate and Bloody Work with the Gloves.”116 With the figure of Bailey, Animal Locomotion subtly accents these hints of violence; although the heavyweight would have competed in gloves at venues like Clark’s Club, here he punches with bare fists, while the white pugilists divide evenly between the gloved and the ungloved. Both African Americans and the pastime of prizefighting, furthermore, were unfavorably associated with gambling and drinking, and in turn with depravity and criminality.117 In 1835, New Jersey became the first of many states (including Pennsylvania) to outlaw boxing for money, and “the sport moved in and out of legality until the 1920s.”118 At the same time, boxing’s connection to wagering brought it into the orbit of machine politics, so that police often turned a blind eye to illegal gambling, although according to historian Roger Lane officials in Philadelphia enforced anti-prizefighting laws more than in other cities.119 To circumvent the law promoters often advertised matches as exhibitions or staged them in locations that were some combination of secret, makeshift, and remote.120 Presumably most of these contests escaped the notice of the papers, but a handful featuring Ben Bailey have survived in the archival record. Just weeks before modeling at Penn, on April 13, Bailey fought “Clipper” Donahue “in an up-town resort” and maintained the upper hand until the sixth round, “when a cry of Police! stopped the match.”121 Bailey’s twenty-round defeat by Mike Boden in March 1890, meanwhile, took place at night on a tugboat along a quiet stretch of the Delaware River downstream from the city, and the Philadelphia Item happily noted that “the affair was brought off without any interference on the part of the authorities.”122 Although Bailey appears in Animal Locomotion without any overt signs of the urban demimonde in which he often sparred, his status as an ungloved African American heavyweight might have marked him as a prizefighter and thus less refined than the white sporting amateurs, largely drawn from Penn’s students and faculty, that otherwise staffed the project’s athletic series.123

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The reputation of thoroughbred racing likewise suffered from its proximity to illegal activity. Pennsylvania law allowed horseracing for purses “at county fairs and incorporated driving parks” like Belmont, but forbade any form of wagering at the track, which explains why Philadelphians had to travel to New Jersey to bet on thoroughbred contests. Despite these regulations, however, betting pools were a persistent fixture of Belmont Park and the city’s other trotting venues.124 Turning a blind eye to gambling helped ensure robust turnout, but, unchecked, threatened to sour visitors on the experience.125 Above all, trotting promoters needed to ensure that any gambling that did occur in no way influenced (or even appeared to influence) the actual competition, in order to claim greater propriety over thoroughbred racing.126 While nothing in the Muybridge portfolio explicitly references track betting, our protagonist’s identity as an African American thoroughbred rider contrasts with the white trotting amateurs found in the archive’s equestrian sequences. An anecdote about Animal Locomotion dramatizes these distinctions. “Early in his experiments at the University,” recalled the Philadelphia Bulletin, “Mr. Muybridge secured a horse which closely resembled the Greek type. A young Philadelphian, well-known as a skillful horseman, was entrusted with the difficult task of riding the animal, adopting the form of riding commonly seen in Greek sculpture. Several photographs of the horse at full speed were taken, and the various positions recorded by the camera were found to be identical with those of the figures found on the frieze of the Parthenon.”127 Attired in the curious costume of a pelvis cloth and a tam (figure 33), this equestrian does indeed bring to mind classical art, if only for his near-nudity. Hoping to measure his experiments by the yardstick of artistic excellence, the photographer chose not the seasoned, professional rider atop Annie G., but a white man on a white horse. By contrast, Black riders at times reminded contemporaries of the barbaric, iniquitous enemies of the ancient Greeks; the same contemporary who compared Murphy to the

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Figure 33.  Eadweard Muybridge, “Animals and Movements, Horses, Canter; saddle; gray horse Smith” (Animal Locomotion, Plate 622). 1887. Photomechanical collotype print, 48.5 × 62.5 cm. (19 ⅛ × 24 ⅝ in.). Photo: Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library.

Greek god Apollo, for instance, also observed that he “sits his horse like a Centaur.”128 This comparison of Murphy to the half-man, half-horse of mythology only endorsed the prevailing correlation of African Americans with beasts. African American boxers too had difficulty maintaining their purchase in a cultural and aesthetic pantheon. When the Spirit of the Times reported that Bailey was “posing as a statuette,” it felt compelled to editorialize that “[h]is physique is good but the frontispiece”—by which the writer meant Bailey’s face—“is a little off,” hinting, perhaps, that a mixed-race athlete could never quite stand atop the Apollo Belvedere’s pedestal.129 Likewise, Langford’s illustration (figure 28) partly undercuts the sentiments of the San Francisco Examiner article that elevated the Apollonian Peter Jackson over the Herculean Eugen Sandow. Even as we marvel at the former’s exemplary physiognomy and the high, prominent brow that implies ingenuity in the ring, his ill-defined facial features and the rear, three-quarter vantage

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threaten to present us with a type rather than a celebrated individual. Jackson’s treatment in ink ratifies Frederick Douglass’s contention decades prior: “Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists. It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of Black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features.”130 For athletes like Bailey and Jackson, even public acclamation came freighted with horridly racist intimations.

s ta n da r d s a n d s c i e nc e It is all the more curious, then, that Muybridge, the supervising Penn faculty, and the proprietors of Belmont Park would have sanctioned the appearance of professional African American athletes, even for the purposes of scientific photographic experiments, since for many they conjured the specter of vice. The jockey’s silks could serve, as we have seen, as a kind of armor that shielded the wearer from some of the period’s racism. But they equally came emblazoned with stigmas that hindered the ability of these Black professionals to be accepted as equal citizens, and as gentlemen. Horse and rider would have simultaneously evoked the sport’s patrician antebellum origins on southern slave plantations and the criminal activities that often accompanied track betting. At the same time, the Muybridge photos might have proven attractive to devotees of the turf and the ring, since the inclusion of jockeys and pugilists in the pages of a professional University publication would have supported advocates’ efforts to legitimize these sports as scientifically based and genteel pursuits. Muybridge’s visit to the Belmont oval came at a particularly critical juncture. The park had struggled to maintain its early crowds and by the onset of 1885 had fallen into receivership. Then, that February, the Directors of the Belmont Driving Park Association awarded a three-year lease to W. W. Bair and C. B. Phipps.131 Many observers had attributed Belmont’s recent financial straits to rampant bribery and corruption. “When . . . Mssrs. Bair and Phipps

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select able, fearless and impartial judges, and insist on the [betting] poolseller taking no part in the races,” opined the Spirit of the Times, “then the public will be inspired with confidence and thousands will enter the Park gates as of yore.”132 Many of the mounts competing at their inaugural races on May 4, including Nellie Rose, owned by track manager C. B. Phipps, and Lizzie M., owned by Fred M. Gerker, would perform later that year for Animal Locomotion.133 Thus Belmont’s new owners entered the 1885 season with the need to certify that the events they hosted were fair and aboveboard. But just weeks before Muybridge’s visit, a race-fixing scandal erupted at the oval. After a “great trotting duel between Harry Wilkes and Phallas” on August 13 before a crowd of five thousand resulted in the defeat of the latter, the current record holder, The National Police Gazette reported that “it was the general opinion of sporting men that the race was a fraud; that it was an outrageous piece of cheatery; [and] that Philadelphia was fast gaining the reputation of being the Mecca of horse sharps.”134 In particular, critics accused organizers of the scheme of “hippodroming,” which turfing chronicler Samuel L. Boardman defined as “the plan of taking two well-known horses together through the country to trot for purses and divide the profits.”135 Debate over the race’s authenticity filled trade publications for weeks and sullied the reputation of track and city alike within racing circles.136 This quest for legitimacy effectively explains why Bair and Phipps would have sanctioned, and might even have solicited, the photographer’s experiments on site. The timing of Muybridge’s experiments was no less fortuitous for promoters of athletics at the University of Pennsylvania. For it was precisely at this moment that elite institutions like Penn began to introduce sports like boxing into their curricula. Just weeks before Bailey’s session with Muybridge, the University’s Board of Trustees had established the Department of Physical Education under the direction of Medical School Professor Dr. J. William White. Its inaugural staff included sparring instructor William

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McLain, who likely conducted classes in the makeshift gymnasium which opened in the basement of College Hall that December.137 By the early twentieth century, required classes for freshmen included swimming, gymnastics, and “a third series in March in which boxing and wrestling, gymnastic games and dancing steps are principal features.”138 New athletic facilities that opened in 1904 provided rooms specifically for sparring.139 This expansion of university athletics was an integral part of the American bourgeoisie’s embrace of physical culture over the last two decades of the nineteenth century, as famously exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt’s endorsement of the “strenuous life.”140 The photographer himself was an early adopter of and enthusiastic proponent of physical culture. During his time in San Francisco, he joined the athletic association the Olympic Club, lived for four years with the co-founders of the Club, artist brothers Arthur and Charles Nahl, and personally recruited some of its instructors to pose for studies of human locomotion in Palo Alto in August 1879.141 Even more, Muybridge squandered no opportunity to display his own unclothed and toned physique before his arsenal of stop-motion cameras, whether at Leland Stanford’s stock farm or in the courtyard of Penn’s Veterinary School. Clearly eager to demonstrate his muscular prowess while in his mid-fifties, he walks, ascends stairs and inclines, sprinkles water, saws and hammers, shovels dirt, swings a pickaxe, and hurls a discus—all while entirely naked—in the pages of Animal Locomotion. He shared this commitment to the performance of vigorous, bodily masculinity with not only the numerous professional and amateur athletes featured in the project but also artist Thomas Eakins, director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and member of Muybridge’s supervising committee, who often posed nude himself for the purposes of art instruction. But given its checkered history and working-class origins, boxing required legitimization to gain entry into an elite milieu like an Ivy League college. First, advocates distinguished between the amateur pugilist and the prizefighter who boxed for money. “We must save athletics from the profes-

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sional athletes,” urged O’Reilly, “and from the evil association of betting and gambling.”142 Even more, the widespread adoption of the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, which among other things mandated the use of padded gloves, endowed the sport with an aura of respectability and sportsmanship.143 “The chief reason why boxing has fallen into disrepute,” O’Reilly opined, “is the English practice of prize-fighting with bare hands, and under improper rules.”144 And this standardization of boxing in both amateur and professional circles, argues historian Louis Moore, would have attracted Black fighters by promising them fair and regulated competitions.145 Pugilophiles also sought to vindicate the sport by celebrating the display of acuity in the ring—termed “science” by insiders—over mere strength. “Where it has appeared that downright force has succeeded once,” opined Richard Fox in 1890, “skill has produced victory a hundred times. Courage would degenerate into mere ferocity if not tempered with judgment, and brutality would be the most prominent feature in all contests.”146 O’Reilly too emphasized the tactical character of fisticuffs. Describing “the boxer, in action,” he maintained that “his mind is quicker and more watchful than a chess-player’s.”147 Public acclaim for the “science” of many African American champions like Jackson and Dixon was both cause and product of their esteem in the white athletic world. Muybridge’s model, too, garnered praise for his shrewd pugilism. One notice for a boxing program organized at the club where Ben Bailey conducted most of his fights reported of owner John Clark that “he endeavors to please the sporting fraternity by engaging the most scientific boxers in the country.”148 And when Bailey bested Tony Brown in four rounds for a $50 prize in March 1885 at that same venue, Sporting Life editorialized that “Brown is a man of great strength, but he lacked science,” indicating the victor’s greater talent and cunning.149 Trotting enthusiasts at Belmont and beyond similarly labored to validate their sport through standardization and science. Like the instigation of the Queensberry Rules, the development of turfing organizational

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infrastructure—from the formation of the National Trotting Association in 1870, to the organization of the National Association of Trotting Horse Breeders in 1876, to the publication of the first stud book for trotters in 1881— promised to implement and enforce rules and regulations within the industry.150 American owners and trainers like Leland Stanford credited their numerous records on the track, meanwhile, to systematic breeding and training practices.151 These claims of scientific rigor papered over less favorable associations with either an idle, decadent, and horse-bound aristocracy or the shady domain of bookmakers. Muybridge likewise pledged that his scientific endeavors would uncover the secrets of the animal world. In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, he expressed hope that he would have the opportunity to train his lenses on champion trotter Maud S. “The track at Belmont will be arranged so that the most trifling peculiarity in gait will be reproduced. Mr. Muybridge thinks that the famous horse has some trick of footfall that is the secret to her speed.”152 Not merely the inclusion, but also the visual regimentation and systemization of Bailey, Annie G.’s rider, and their fellow athletes in Animal Locomotion would have abetted the efforts of advocates at Penn and at Belmont Park to valorize sporting culture as a disciplined, “scientific,” and even educational pursuit. Most critically, the adoption of gridded backgrounds from physical anthropology would have fortified claims of rational scientificity for Pennsylvania sportsmen and the photographer alike. The utilization of the grid as a visual tool in the human arts and sciences has a long history, of course, but its deployment here by Muybridge may have been suggested, and certainly would have been endorsed, by university professors on the supervising committee.153 And so, even as Bailey delivers a vicious haymaker nearly the breadth of the still, and even as Annie G. and her rider barrel furiously forward, they do so in anodyne and sanitized spaces: within the confines of five-centimeter gridwork, before a battery of technical equipment, and in the context of a scientific study conducted with the imprimatur of a

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major research university. A heavyweight’s tensed muscles and quivering horseflesh thus become networks of mathematical coordinates on a Cartesian plane.154 Proponents of pugilism sanctioned the sport through stop-motion photography in other contexts as well. Over three 1887 issues of the fashionable sporting magazine Outing—just as Animal Locomotion came out in print— Charles E. Clay illustrated his article “A Bout with the Gloves” with two dozen line drawings based upon “a succession of instantaneous photographs, made by Falk, of Broadway” of lightweight champions Billy Edwards and Arthur Chambers. The diagrammatic character of these frozen sparring vignettes, the use of gloved models, and the author’s inclusion of the text of the Queensberry rules in his essay together would have ratified the judiciousness of boxing.155 No wonder that John O’Reilly reused many of these very same images the following year in his Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport, and that George Dixon, who had apprenticed with a photographer in Boston in his teens, likewise featured instantaneous snapshots in his “Lesson in Boxing” (figure 20).156 Turfing aficionados sanitized horseracing through the clinical eye of the camera as well. When German immigrant, Philadelphia resident, and preeminent animal photographer George Francis Schreiber published his 1874 Portraits of Noted Horses, which included champion mounts from Kentucky to Boston, he proffered it as a means by which turfmen might hone their expertise, just as would Muybridge a decade later. In the portfolio’s brief introduction, Schreiber counseled that “such a galaxy of distinguished horses” would be “interesting and instructive to the student of equinology, who seeks in form and proportion for the explanation of speed and endurance.”157 By this he attributed an empirical basis to the science of horseflesh. And, just a few years after Animal Locomotion came out in print, racing officials began to validate the impartiality of races through image-making. For the great contest on June 25, 1890 at Sheepshead Bay between mounts

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Salvator and Tenny—the very one which inspired Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poetic ventriloquism of Isaac Murphy—Coney Island Jockey Club employee J. C. Hemment recorded the very first “photo finish,” the great-grandfather of the “instant replay” employed in many professional sports today.158 Then as now, instantaneity seemed unassailably truthful.

c onc lusion In all, Eadweard Muybridge’s archive demonstrates that while Black athletes were not generally accepted as complete equals by the white sporting and broader publics, they could occupy marginal yet productive spaces, both social and discursive, unavailable to most African Americans. At once a participant in a pioneering physiological study and a naked and imposing Hercules, Bailey here seems to have found a way to chart the “middle course” demanded by Nast’s cartoon (figure 32), one that triangulated science and sinew, professionalism and criminality, the ancient Greek gymnasium and the criminal underworld, and even Black and white. Likewise, the man riding Annie G. successfully, if precariously, straddled the stable and Mount Olympus, and the laboratory and the betting pool. Even as popular visual culture weighed these Black competitors down with bestial stereotypes, African American sportsmen lifted themselves up through affiliations with classical antiquity. Although contemporaries might have viewed their physiognomy as too bulky or slight to embody the masculine ideal, Ben Bailey and our anonymous jockey will forever remain epitomes of locomotion thanks to Muybridge’s archive. As a study of movement, furthermore, Animal Locomotion obliges us to consider the complex and conflicting forms of mobility available and denied to African Americans in Philadelphia and beyond. Once more, my co-author nicely encapsulates the inherent tensions: “Black mobilities clearly have a fluid and contradictory set of meanings that can simultane-

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ously be read as restrained, compelled, and submissive on the one hand, or excessive, free, and resistant on the other.”159 Muybridge’s study did not simply exhibit African Americans in white, exclusive spaces, but it authorized them to exist there, even if for a split second, and to rise above the station assigned them. Sites like the Belmont track and the Penn Veterinary Department spotlight the mutually informed character of segregation and elite identity: what is white, is white-collared, and vice versa. It is therefore no accident that one of the earliest and most contentious postbellum fights over desegregation concerned Black access to streetcars, which might have opened up whole new sections of the city to them, and allowed them to rub shoulders with white Philadelphians of nearly every caste. Social mixing between the races was far more common in working-class milieus, which renders Black presence in Narberth and the Penn camps all the more striking. It is my hope that this scholarship will place Animal Locomotion in the company of and in dialogue with other studies of African Americans’ purposeful uses of photography in the nineteenth century. Shawn Michelle Smith has offered her now-classic Photography on the Color Line as “a critical methodology that sees race as fundamental to and defined by visual culture, that understands race and visual culture to be mutually constitutive, and that reads photographic archives as racialized sites invested in laying claim to contested cultural meanings.” She establishes how African Americans like Du Bois produced counter-archives like Types of American Negroes, Georgia, USA, in order to combat the prevailing visual culture of white supremacy.160 What Muybridge’s photographic databases might suggest is that archives contain the seeds of their own counter-archives.161 Finally, I also hope that the case studies here under consideration encourage other scholars to look beyond the art world (as conventionally defined) and towards alternate media ecologies like photography and print culture to locate

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evidence of Black agency and mobility. It is no coincidence that Douglass and Du Bois staked their visual claims in the media of photography, which they deemed more democratic in character.162 The stills of Ben Bailey in Animal Locomotion bear witness to a critical transitional period when African American boxers alternatively made advances and suffered setbacks in their efforts to fully desegregate the sport. As part of a slate of world championship bouts billed as a “Fistic Carnival” and held over several evenings in September 1892 at the Olympic Club’s 10,000-seat arena in New Orleans, for example, George Dixon squared off against the white fighter Jack Skelly for the featherweight title. Dixon’s decisive victory, however, triggered an official ban on interracial contests at the club and an informal nationwide ban that lasted for a decade. Coverage from the New Orleans Times-Democrat clarifies the rationale for the embargo on Black fighters: “It was a mistake to match a negro and a white man, a mistake to bring the races together on any terms of equality, even in the prize ring. . . . It was not pleasant to see a white man applaud a negro for knocking another white man out.”163 Whenever they let their guard down, white Americans quickly learned the consequences of granting Black boxers a chance “to solve the Negro question,” as Douglass would phrase it just a year later. Not until 1902 and 1908, respectively, would Joe Gans and Jack Johnson be given a shot at, and successfully capture, the world lightweight and heavyweight championships. African American jockeys, by contrast, would not enjoy much more time in the spotlight. Brimming with portraits of dignified and esteemed Black professionals, Lyman Weeks’s American Turf, issued two years after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, is today a memorial to their heyday. In the waning years of the nineteenth century their numbers would decline so precipitously that one 1900 roster included only five identifiably African American jockeys, and 1921 was the last time a Black man participated in the Kentucky Derby

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until the year 2000.164 Much of the cause was surely financial; the prospect of handsome salaries attracted more and more contenders until the industry could stem the tide of Jim Crow no longer. Similar developments decimated the ranks of Black barbers, plumbers, and most of the other remaining unrestricted skilled trades, especially with increased immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.165 The chief exclusionary mechanism was the Jockey Club, chartered in 1894. While the organization did license African American jockeys, in sharp contrast to other sports, it marginalized them in other ways: the physical clubhouses were open only to whites, for instance, and, as Tony Williams’s case made clear, they more frequently experienced sanctions.166 No wonder, then, that African Americans—unlike in Animal Locomotion—appeared last and in their own section in Weeks’s tome.167 The Club also centralized thoroughbred breeding around the large stable owners in the greater New York area. This in turn pushed out those smaller stables more likely to employ Black jockeys or be owned by African Americans, just as Black caterers suffered from the concurrent consolidation of the hospitality industry around large professional hotels.168 Still, Gilded Age images like the frozen snapshots of Annie G. in Animal Locomotion remain a permanent record of the remarkable acme of Black jockeys, whose time in the sun today seems almost as brief as the split second captured by Eadweard Muybridge’s cameras.

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notes

i n t roduc t ion 1.  The details of the patronage and working relationship between Muybridge and Stanford vary depending on the source, but see Anita Ventura Mozley, Robert Haas, and Francois Forster-Hahn, Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872–1882 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Museum of Art, 1972); Anita Ventura Mozley, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” in Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), xii–xxii; Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 45–49, 93–97, 109–16; Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (Palo Alto, CA: The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center, in association with Oxford University Press, 2003), 9–23, 134–52; John Ott, “Iron Horses: Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Industrialised Eye,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 3 (Fall 2005), 407–28; and Philip Brookman, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2010), 77–88. 2.  California Spirit of the Times, June 22, 1878. 3.  For a fuller discussion of “annihilation,” see Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003), 3–24. See also Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press), 194.

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4.  The fullest biography remains Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion, from which many of the following details are taken. But see also Marta Braun’s excellent Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion Books, 2010). 5.  The dates vary depending on the source, but see Solnit, River of Shadows, 271, for a helpful discussion.

v i s ua l i z i ng mobi l i t y / t i m c r e s s w e l l I am grateful to the suitably critical audiences in the History Departments at the Universities of Warwick and Michigan where I presented earlier versions of this essay. Likewise, I am grateful to the organizers and audience at the conference Eadweard Muybridge: Re-presenting History in the Digital Age at the British Film Institute in London back in 2010. I am indebted to the various reviewers of this manuscript who have engaged thoughtfully and productively with some of my more half-formed thoughts. Our editor Archna Patel and co-authors John and Tony have been a joy to work with. I am particularly grateful to Tony for his original invitation and for his subsequent patience. 1.  For key texts see Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning A 38, no. 2 (2006): 207–26; Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006); John Urry, Mobilities (London: Polity, 2007). 2.  Tim Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 1 (2010): 17–31. 3.  For accounts of place see Tim Cresswell, Place: An Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). 4.  For more on this see Cresswell, On the Move; Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” 5.  Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion, 2001). 6.  For accounts of automobility see John Urry, “The System of Automobility,” Theory, Culture and Society 21, no. 4–5 (2004): 25–39; Jörg Beckmann, “Automobility—A Social Problem and Theoretical Concept,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, no. 5 (2001): 593–607. 7.  James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Jennifer Tucker, “Eye on the

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Street: Photography in Urban Public Spaces,” Radical History Review 114 (2012): 7–18. 8.  John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage, 2011). 9.  Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion, 2010); Rebecca Solnit, Motion Studies: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (London: Bloomsbury, 2003). 10.  Rebecca Solnit, “Ghost River or Photography in Yosemite,” in Yosemite in Time, ed. Mark Klett, Rebecca Solnit, and Byron Wolfe (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2008), 14–15. For more on mobility in Muybridge’s landscape photographs see Dimitrios Latsis, “Landscape in Motion: Muybridge and the Origins of Chronophotography,” Film History 27, no. 3 (2015): 1–40. 11.  Solnit, Motion Studies. 12.  Solnit, Motion Studies. 13.  John Ott, “Iron Horses: Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Industrialised Eye,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 3 (2005): 407–28. 14.  For more detailed accounts of this process see Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Braun, Eadweard Muybridge. 15.  Ott, “Iron Horses,” 130. 16.  “General News,” The Tablet, September 22, 1877, 24. 17.  Braun, Eadweard Muybridge. 18.  Sacramento Daily Union, June 18, 1878, quoted in Braun, Eadweard Muybridge, 143. 19.  For the classic account of the railroad machine ensemble see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 20.  For more on “time-space compression” see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 21.  John Ott, “Iron Horses,” 407. 22.  Norman Bryson, “Cultural Studies and Dance History,” in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane Desmond (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 59. 23.  Bryson, “Cultural Studies and Dance History,” 69. 24.  Bryson, “Cultural Studies and Dance History,” 69.

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25.  Bryson, “Cultural Studies and Dance History,” 71. 26.  Bryson, “Cultural Studies and Dance History,” 71. 27.  For more on these see E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–97; Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. 28.  Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers : Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998). 29.  Hacking, Mad Travelers, 8. 30.  Hacking, Mad Travelers, 13. 31.  See Keith Tester, ed. The Flaneur (London: Routledge, 1994); Susan BuckMorss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140. 32.  Tim Cresswell, “The Vagrant/Vagabond: The Curious Career of a Mobile Subject,” in Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, ed. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 239–54. 33.  Hacking, Mad Travelers, 81–82. 34.  Ott, “Iron Horses.” 35.  Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity; Nigel Thrift, “Inhuman Geographies: Landscapes of Speed, Light and Power,” in Writing the Rural: Five Cultural Geographies, ed. Paul Cloke (London: Paul Chapman, 1994): 191–248. 36.  Clay McShane, “Gelded Age Boston,” New England Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2001): 274–302. 37.  For a noted discussion of “cyborgs” see Donna Jeanne Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 38.  McShane, “Gelded Age Boston,” 292. 39.  Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 40.  Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1947). 41.  For exceptions that focus on Muybridge’s later photographs with their more finely defined grid, see, for instance, Elspeth H. Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body: Eadweard Muybridge’s Locomotion Studies 1883–1887,” Gender and History 17, no. 3 (2005): 627–56; Solnit, Motion Studies.

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42.  John Ott, “Iron Horses”, 414. 43.  Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), 4. 44.  Ingold, Lines, 152. 45.  For various accounts of the role of numbers in modern society see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galiston, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Lisa Adkins and Celia Lury, eds., Measure and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 46.  James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 51. 47.  Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Knopf, 1990). 48.  Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971); Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961). 49.  James Corner and Alex S. MacLean, Taking Measures across the American Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Mumford, The City in History. 50.  C. Albert White, A History of the Rectangular Survey System (Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior, 1983). 51.  Scott, Seeing Like a State. 52.  For further connections between Lamprey and Muybridge see Sarah Gordon, Indecent Exposures: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion Nudes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 53.  Huxley quoted in Frank Spencer, “Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply Photography to Anthropometry During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 99. 54.  Scott, Seeing Like a State; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971); Matthew G. Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in NineteenthCentury America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 55.  Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 637. 56.  Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 8 (1979): 50–52.

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57.  Krauss, “Grids,” 52. 58.  Hannah Higgins, The Grid Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 59.  Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America. 60.  John Pultz, Photography and the Body (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1995), 30–31. 61.  Sol LeWitt in conversation with Lucy Lippard, in Lucy R. Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: Dutton, 1971), 164. 62.  Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 144. 63.  John Kouwenhoven, The Beer-Can by the Highway (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), 50. 64.  Krauss, “Grids,” 60. 65.  For a wider discussion of the strange sequencing in Muybridge see Marta Braun, “Muybridge’s Scientific Fictions,” Studies in Visual Communication 10, no. 3 (1984): 3–21. 66.  Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. 67.  For detailed accounts see Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Braun, Eadweard Muybridge; Cresswell, On the Move. 68.  Lewis M. Haupt, quoted in Gordon, Indecent Exposures, 60–61. 69.  For a detailed consideration of nudity in these images see Gordon, Indecent Exposures. 70.  Marta Braun and Elizabeth Whitcombe, “Marey, Muybridge, and Londe: The Photography of Pathological Locomotion,” History of Photography 23, no. 3 (1999): 218–24. 71.  See Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter, 1986): 3–64. 72.  Sydny Shepard, “New Surveillence Tool: Gait Recognition,” Security Today, November 12, 2018, https://securitytoday.com/articles/2018/11/12/new -surveillance-tool-gait-recognition.aspx, accessed July 21, 2020. 73.  Anja Kanngieser, “Tracking and Tracing: Geographies of Logistical Governance and Labouring Bodies,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31, no. 4 (2013): 594–610.

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74.  S. Sumner et al., “Radio-Tagging Technology Reveals Extreme NestDrifting Behavior in a Eusocial Insect,” Current Biology 17, no. 2 (2007): 140–45. 75.  Matthew Sparke, “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,” Political Geography 25, no. 2 (2006): 151–80. 76.  N. Gane et al., “Ubiquitous Surveillance—Interview with Katherine Hayles,” Theory Culture & Society 24, no. 7–8 (2007): 349–58. For an innovative use of RFID tags attached to pigeons in the name of art, see http://project-urbaneyes  .blogspot.co.uk. 77.  Lauren B. Wilcox, Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 78.  Nina Franz, “Targeted Killing and Pattern-of-Life Analysis: Weaponised Media,” Media, Culture and Society 39, no. 1 (2017): 111–21. 79.  Michael W. Lewis, “Drones: Actually the Most Humane Form of  Warfare Ever,” The Atlantic, August 23, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com /international/archive/2013/08/drones-actually-the-most-humane-form-of-warfare-  ever/278746. 80.  Wilcox, Bodies of Violence, 158. 81.  Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006). 82.  Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, “Flying through Code/Space: The Real Virtuality of Air Travel,” Environment and Planning A 36 (2004): 195–211; N. J. Thrift and S. French, “The Automatic Production of Space,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27 (2002): 309–35. 83.  Deborah Cowen, “A Geography of Logistics: Market Authority and the Security of Supply Chains,” Annals for the Association of American Geographers 100, no. 3 (2010): 600–20; Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Tim Cresswell and Craig Martin, “On Turbulence: Entanglements of Disorder and Order on a Devon Beach,” Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie 103, no. 5 (2012): 516–29.

r ac e a n d mobi l i t y / joh n o t t The research for this project was generously supported by a John H. Daniels Fellowship from the National Sporting Library & Museum, an Edna T. Shaeffer Humanist Award, and the James Madison University Program of Grants for Faculty Assistance. Conversations with Alan Braddock, Brooks Hefner, Anna O.

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Marley, Asma Naaem, and Matt Rebhorn early in the process encouraged me to pursue this topic in earnest. Lyneise Williams, Giulia Smith, Jordana Moore, and Jennifer Doyle chaired or served as a discussant for two engaging panels on athletics and visual culture at the 2018 and 2019 College Art Association Conferences. Sage commentary from Tanya Sheehan on a preliminary draft strengthened the essay. I am especially grateful for the editorial leadership of Archna Patel and my co-conspirators Tim and Tony, whose wisdom and collegiality have ensured that this enterprise has become something more than its individual parts. This work would never have come to fruition, finally, without the love of Tina and Linus and their patience with my various archival junkets. 1.  Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements Published under the Auspices of the University of Philadelphia. Prospectus and Catalog of Plates (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1887), 12. On the Philadelphia period of his career, see Anita Ventura Mozley, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” in Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), xiii–xxvi; Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 135–44; Philip Prodger, Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 134–52; Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003), 220–26; Philip Brookman, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2010), 77–88; and Sarah Gordon, Indecent Exposures: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion Nudes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 35–129. 2.  Animal Locomotion has recently undergone a renaissance of academic inquiry, but writers rarely linger on his images of African Americans and pay little attention to their particular social geography. The exceptions, on whose important work I depend and hope to build, are Elspeth H. Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body: Eadweard Muybridge’s Locomotion Studies 1883–1887,” Gender & History 17, no. 3 (November 2005): 631–38; and Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 83–86. 3.  Black athletes from this period have been the subject of intensive recent scrutiny, both academic and more popular. See Colleen Aycock and Mark Scott, The First Black Boxing Champions: Essays on the Fighters of the 1800s to the 1920s (Jef-

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ferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010); Gregory Bond, “Jim Crow at Play: Race, Manliness, and the Color Line in American Sports, 1876–1916 (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2008); Edward Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America’s First National Sport (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 1990); Steven Laffolet, Shadowboxing: The Rise and Fall of George Dixon (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press, 2012); Pellom McDaniels III, The Prince of Jockeys: The Life of Isaac Burns Murphy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013); Katherine C. Mooney, Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); and James Robert Saunders, Black Winning Jockeys in the Kentucky Derby (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2002). None of this important scholarship, however, has addressed at any length the images that proliferated during their subjects’ heyday. 4.  Mooney, Race Horse Men, 47. 5.  The first scholar to address Black bodies in Animal Locomotion, Brown considers the pugilist’s appearance in the archive as symptomatic of a period impulse to mark and subordinate the racial difference of Black bodies, a position which Smith has more recently ratified. In this essay I do not so much reject their analysis as hope to enrich it by identifying moments of African American agency and mobility. See Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 631–38; and Smith, Edge of Sight, 83–86. 6.  Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. 7.  Peter Adey, Mobility, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2017), 7. See also John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2007). 8.  Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 79; Celeste-Marie Bernier and Bill E. Lawson, “Preface,” in Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass, 1818–2018 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 14. Other seminal contributions include Deborah Willis, ed., J. P. Ball: Daguerrean and Studio Photographer (New York: Garland, 1993); Deborah Willis, Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New York: New Press, 1994); Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840–1999 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006);

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Richard J. Powell, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds. Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Earnestine Jenkins, Race, Representation & Photography in 19th-Century Memphis: From Slavery to Jim Crow (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2016); and Tanya Sheehan, Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), 68–71, 149–60. 9.  Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Prospectus, 12. The earliest reference to Bailey I could locate is “Colored Pugilism,” Sporting Life, April 22, 1883, 7. 10.  Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 46. 11.  On Clark, see Billy Edwards, The Portrait Gallery of Pugilists in America and Their Contemporaries (Philadelphia: Pugilistic Pub. Co., 1894), n.p.; and Tracy Callis, Chuck Hasson, and Mike DeLisa, Philadelphia’s Boxing Heritage, 1876–1976 (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2002), 11. 12.  The First 300: The Amazing and Rich History of Lower Merion (Collingdale, PA: Diane Publishing Co., 2000), 233. 13.  “Taking Leo’s Picture,” Philadelphia Press, August 22, 1885, 5. 14.  “Laws of Motion,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 18, 1885, 1. 15.  American Stud Book 4 (1883): 446. 16.  “Philadelphia, Pa.,” Spirit of the Times, September 19, 1885, 241; Sporting Life, September 30, 1885, 6; “Philadelphia Once More,” Spirit of the Times, October 17, 1885, 376; “Philadelphia, Pa.,” Spirit of the Times, October 10, 1885, 337; “Racing at Philadelphia,” Turf Field and Farm, October 9, 1885, 298; “Philadelphia, Pa.,” Spirit of the Times, October 24, 1885, 406; “Trotting Meetings,” Sporting Life, October 21, 1885, 8. 17.  American Stud Book 6 (1893): 174. 18.  John Hervey, American Harness Racing (New York: Hartenstein, 1948), 61; Dwight Akers, Drivers Up: The Story of American Harness Racing (New York: Putnam, 1938), 137, 238–43. 19.  Henry William Herbert, Frank Forester’s Horse and Horsemanship of the United States and the British Provinces of North America (New York: G. E. Woodward, 1871), 2:126. See also Melvin I. Adelman, “The First Modern Sport in America: Harness Racing in NY City, 1825–1870,” in Paul J. Zingg, ed., The Sporting Image:

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Notes to Pages 56– 60

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Readings in American Sport History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 107–38; and Hervey, American Harness Racing, 31–32. 20.  Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys, 195. 21.  “Our Philadelphia Letter,” Chicago Horseman, May 28, 1885, 392. See also Walter Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia,” in Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller, eds., The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 123, 128–33. 22.  Roger Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 117; Steven A. Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 36. 23.  Richard K. Fox, The Black Champions of the Prize Ring from Molineaux to Jackson (London: Richard K. Fox, 1897), 144. 24.  Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2008), 175. 25.  Fox, The Black Champions of the Prize Ring, 179; Colleen Aycock, “Joe Gans: World Lightweight Champion,” in Aycock and Scott, The First Black Boxing Champions, 79; David K. Wiggins, “Peter Jackson and the Elusive Heavyweight Championship,” in Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, eds., A Question of Manhood: Volume 2, The 19th Century, from Emancipation to Jim Crow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 284. 26.  Smith, At the Edge of Sight, 85. 27.  Davis and Haller, The Peoples of Philadelphia, 111, 179, 208. 28.  Davis and Haller, The Peoples of Philadelphia, 288; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996 [1899]), 39–42; and Russell F. Weigley and Nicholas B. Wainwright, Philadelphia: A 300 Year History (New York: Norton, 1982), 437–8. 29.  Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 417; Weigley and Wainwright, Philadelphia, 414–16. Geoff Zylstra, “Whiteness, Freedom, and Technology: The Struggle over Philadelphia’s Streetcars,” Technology and Culture 52:4 (October 2011): 695–701. 30.  Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro , 418; Weigley and Wainwright, Philadelphia, 354. 31.  Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 88; Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds., W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 109.

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Notes to Pages 60– 64

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32.  Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 418; Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 17, 55; Weigley and Wainwright, Philadelphia, 492. 33.  Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 21. 34.  Gorn, The Manly Art, 196. 35.  Riess, City Games, 102–109. 36.  “Great Kennel Wins,” Philadelphia Item, March 7, 1890, 5. 37.  David B. Welky, “Culture, Media and Sport: The National Police Gazette and the Creation of an American Working-Class World,” Culture Sport Society 1, no. 1 (May 1998): 91; Boddy, Boxing, 179; and Wiggins, “Peter Jackson,” 195. 38.  Steven A. Riess, The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime: Horse Racing, Politics, and Organized Crime in New York (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), xii. 39.  Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 29–30; Riess, The Sport of Kings, xii, 31. 40.  Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 28. 41.  Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 117. 42.  Debra Barbezat and James Hughes, “Finding the Lost Jockeys,” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 47, no. 1 (2014): 20, 28. 43.  The photograph appears in Mooney, Race Horse Men, 191; and Bond, “Jim Crow at Play,” 214. 44.  Bond, “Jim Crow at Play,” 177; Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 205. 45.  “The Colored Pugilist,” National Police Gazette, June 20, 1885, 9; Bond, “Jim Crow at Play,” 175–80, 239. 46.  Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 12. 47.  Philadelphia Record, March 7, 1885, 1; Philadelphia Times, April 14, 1885. 48.  “Laws of Motion,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 28, 1885, 1; see also Philadelphia Inquirer, August 25, 1885, Muybridge Scrapbook, Kingston Museum, Kingston-upon-Thames, UK, 144. 49.  John Dizikes, Yankee Doodle Dandy: The Life and Times of Tod Sloan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 62–8; Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys, 5, 297.

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Notes to Pages 64–71

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50.  Malcolm Cormack, Country Pursuits: British, American, and French Sporting Art from the Mellon Collections in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 329–31. 51.  Saunders, Black Winning Jockeys, 6; James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991 [1930]), 60. For the roster of marquee wins by Black jockeys, see Edwin Bancroft Henderson, The Negro in Sports (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1949), 462; and Arthur Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete (New York: Warner Books, 1988), 49. 52.  Spirit of the Times, June 25, 1887, 729; “The American Turf,” Harper’s Weekly, June 18, 1887, 438. See also “Kentucky,” Spirit of the Times, June 7, 1890, 861, in which the correspondent reported that “every prominent jockey in the West is of the colored persuasion;” and Mooney, Race Horse Men, 14, 165. 53.  Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory, 47; see also Mooney, Race Horse Men, 176–212. 54.  In 1885 season, the top thirty-one jockeys won 19 percent of races, but Murphy won fifty-six of 146, or 38 percent; from 1875–79, he won 411 of 1087 races (McDaniels, The Prince of Jockeys, 296, 325). In 1879 “he won 35 out of 75 races in 1879. It was 47 per cent, and is the best average we can find on record” (Vigilant [W. S. Vosburgh], Famous American Jockeys [New York: Richard A. Saalfield, c. 1884], 43). Murphy won eleven of thirty-five in 1880, twenty-two of forty-eight in 1881, and thirty-three of eighty-eight in 1882 (Vosburgh, 44). 55.  “Saratoga,” Spirit of the Times, July 26, 1879, 624; “Jockey Ike Murphy,” Kansas City Star, July 11, 1885, 4 (originally published in the Chicago Tribune). 56.  Unsourced report of Salvator-Tenny race, Spirit of the Times, June 25, 1890, in William H. P. Robertson, History of Thoroughbred Racing in America (New York: Prentice Hall, 1964), 139. James Weldon Johnson avowed that “no American jockey was ever more popular than Isaac Murphy” (Black Manhattan, 61). 57.  Lyman Horace Weeks, The American Turf: An Historical Account of Racing in the United States, with Biographical Sketches of Turf Celebrities (New York: The Historical Company, 1898), 356, 365. 58.  Louis Moore, “Fine Specimens of Manhood,” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 35, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 60. 59.  Henderson, The Negro in Sports, 5–6; and Fox, The Black Champions of the Prize Ring, 135–36. 60.  Bond, “Jim Crow at Play,” 193–94; and Wiggins, “Peter Jackson,” 287.

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Notes to Pages 72–75

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61.  Theodore Hershberg and Henry Williams, “Mulattoes and Blacks: IntraGroup Differences and Social Stratifications in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” in Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century: Essays Toward an Interdisciplinary History of the City, ed. Theodore Hershberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 392–434. The quote appears on 421. 62.  Smith, Photography on the Color Line, 55. 63.  “Young black men who might otherwise have found it impossible to move upward, advanced economically and probably socially by becoming jockeys” (David K. Wiggins, ‘Isaac Murphy: Black Hero in Nineteenth-Century American Sport, 1861–1896,’ Canadian Journal of History of Sport and Physical Education 10 [May 1978]: 15). 64.  Davis and Haller, The Peoples of Philadelphia, 9, 116–7, 124; Weigley and Wainwright, Philadelphia, 492. 65.  “Paradoxically, the stigma of ‘n---r work’ greatly enlarged the black jockeys’ economic and social opportunities” (Wiggins, Isaac Murphy,” 31). See also Davis and Haller, The Peoples of Philadelphia, 124; Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 32–37. 66.  George Dixon, A Lesson in Boxing (n.p.: 1893), 2; Henderson, The Negro in Sports, 23. 67.  “A Six-Round Battle,” Philadelphia Times, April 14, 1885; Philadelphia Item, “Great Kennel Wins,” March 7, 1890, 5. 68.  Spirit of the Times, June 25, 1887, 729; “Jockey Ike Murphy,” Kansas City Star, July 11, 1885, 4; McDaniels, The Prince of Jockeys, 237, 258, 307; Mooney, Race Horse Men, 201. 69.  “My Life as a Slave,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, October 1884, 730–38. 70.  Smith, Color Line, 63–76, 79. 71.  Johnson, Black Manhattan, 73. See also Moore, “Fine Specimens of Manhood,” 72–76; Bond, “Jim Crow at Play,” 3, 15–23. “In public, Jackson often assumed a deferential mask and shaped his feelings in the direction he thought whites wanted them to be” (Wiggins, “Peter Jackson,” 290). 72.  Quoted in Gorn, The Manly Art, 54–5. 73.  Spirit of the Times, June 25, 1887, 729; “The American Turf,” Harper’s Weekly, June 18, 1887, 438. See also Bond, “Jim Crow at Play,” 3, 15–18.

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Notes to Pages 77–79

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74.  On Murphy’s gentlemanliness, see Vosburgh, Famous American Jockeys, 43; Spirit of the Times, May 8, 1886, 456; John H. Davis, The American Turf (New York: John Polhemus Printing Company, 1907), 102–3; and Bond, “Jim Crow at Play,” 20–21. 75.  Tamar Garb, “Modeling the Body: Photography, Physical Culture, and the Classical Ideal in Fin-de-Siècle France,” in Geraldine A. Johnson, ed., Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 86, 88. See also Michael Hatt, “Physical Culture: The Male Nude and Sculpture in Late Victorian Britain,” in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 251. 76.  Ellery Foutch, “Arresting Beauty: The Perfectionist Impulse of Peale’s Butterflies, Heade’s Hummingbrds, Blaschka’s Flowers, and Sandow’s Body,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2011), 202–24; Donald J. Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 1880–1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 210–14, 222; Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 36; and Gorn, The Manly Art, 12–29. 77.  John Boyle O’Reilly, The Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1888), 76–78. 78.  Vosburgh, Famous American Jockeys, 44. 79.  Moore, “Fine Specimens of Manhood,” 69; Cincinnati Enquirer, January 23, 1883, 4. 80.  Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture,” 1755. For a notorious example of the use of the Apollo Belvedere in race science, see Josiah Clark Nott, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1854), 458; see also Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 81.  “Sandow, The Imperfect Man,” San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1894, 24. See also Aycock and Scott, The First Black Boxing Champions, 43–44. 82.  “Animal Motion,” Philadelphia Times, August 2, 1885, Muybridge Scrapbook, 139. 83.  Sporting Times, June 10, 1885, 8. 84.  Moore, “Fine Specimens of Manhood,” 78.

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Notes to Pages 79–83

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85.  Quoted in Bond, “Jim Crow at Play,” 135. For a description of the painting, see the Indianapolis Freeman, January 7, 1893, 6, cited in James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (New York: Viking Press, 1935), 208. 86.  “Close Finishes at Sheepshead Bay,” Spirit of the Times, July 12, 1890, 1084–85; see also McDaniels, The Prince of Jockeys, 345, 348. 87.  Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “How Salvator Won,” Spirit of the Times, July 12, 1890, 1082. 88.  Bond, “Jim Crow at Play,” xiii–xiv, 62–68, 71–74; James Dormon, “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction Blacks: The ‘Coon’ Song Phenomenon of the Gilded Age,” American Quarterly 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 451–71. 89.  Another period illustration that articulates racist stereotypes through horsemanship is Sol Eytinge, Jr., “Coaching Season in Blackville,” Harper’s Weekly, September 28, 1878, 768. 90.  Currier & Ives, Polished Off. “Golly—he’s licked!!,” lithograph, 1888, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001700597. 91.  “The Clarks at the Club,” Sporting Life, April 22, 1885, 7. 92.  Riess, City Games, 115. 93.  “Young Champions Fight to a Draw,” San Francisco Examiner, July 24, 1897, 8. 94.  Marta Braun, “Leaving Traces,” in Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2005), 96; Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 122–26. 95.  J. H. Lamprey, “On the Method of Measuring the Human Form, for the Use of Students of Ethnology,” Journal of the Ethnological Society 1 (1869): 84–85. On visual anthropometry, see Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 640–4; Smith, Edge of Sight, 83–8; Gordon, Indecent Exposures, 66; Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 46–54; Philippa Levine, “States of Undress: Nakedness and the Colonial Imagination,” Victorian Studies 50, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 200; and John Ott, “Netted Together: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion at the Dawn of Comparative Biology,” in A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia, Ecology, and the Material Imagination, ed. Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe (College Park: Penn State University Press, 2017), 81–95. For an overview of Allen’s career, see

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Daniel G. Brinton, “Dr. Allen’s Contributions to Anthropology,” Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 44 (1897): 522–29. See also Alan Braddock, Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 93–148. 96.  Harrison Allen, “Materials for a Memoir on Animal Locomotion,” in Animal Locomotion: The Muybridge Work at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1888), 97–98. Accordingly I side more with Sarah Gordon, who considered the conjunction of Bailey and the introduction of the grids as more serendipitous (Indecent Exposures, 69). 97.  Wiggins, “Peter Jackson,” 290; see also Aycock and Scott, The First Black Boxing Champions, 5. 98.  Dixon, A Lesson in Boxing, 2. 99.  Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 118. See also Hatt, “Physical Culture,” 252; and Foutch, “Arresting Beauty,” 182–83. 100.  Quoted in Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 56. 101.  O’Reilly, The Ethics of Boxing, 76–8. 102.  D. A. Sargent, “The Inomotor: A Fundamental Mechanism for a New System of Motor Vehicles, Testing Apparatus and Developing Appliances,” American Physical Education Review 5 (December 1900): 312. See also Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York: NYU Press, 2005), 57. 103.  R. Tait McKenzie, “Building the Physical Side of College Men,” The Illustrated Sporting News 2 (May 7, 1904): 6. 104.  Thomas Nast, “Education: Is There No Middle Course?,” Harper’s Weekly, November 30, 1879, 696. See also Gorn, The Manly Art, 188. 105.  Robertson, History, 91–92. 106.  “Hamilton May Not Ride,” New York Times, July 28, 1896, 6; “Hamilton is All Right,” New York Times, August 1, 1896, 6. See also Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys, 280–81; 304–6. 107.  Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys, 288. 108.  Herbert, Frank Forester’s Horse, 438. 109.  “Jockey Ike Murphy,” Kansas City Star, July 11, 1885, 4; New York Sportsman, January 12, 1889, 32.

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Notes to Pages 87–91

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110.  McDaniels, The Prince of Jockeys, 227; Mooney, Race Horse Men, 43–4; and Alexander Mackay-Smith, The Race Horses of America, 1832–1873: Portraits and Other Paintings by Edward Troye (Saratoga Springs, NY: National Museum of Racing, 1981), 11. 111.  “Jockey Ike Murphy,” Kansas City Star, July 11, 1885, 4; Spirit of the Times, November 5, 1887, 508; and Weeks, The American Turf, 394. 112.  Spirit of the Times, November 5, 1887, 508. 113.  Riess, City Games, 110. 114.  Gorn, The Manly Art, 124, 205. 115.  National Police Gazette, September 10, 1892, cited in Welky, “Culture, Media and Sport,” 90. 116.  “The Ring,” Sporting Life, December 8, 1886, 5. 117.  Gorn, The Manly Art, 56–65; Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, xiv; and Guy Reel, “This Wicked World: Masculinities and the Portrayals of Sex, Crime, and Sports in the National Police Gazette, 1879–1906,” American Journalism 22, no. 1 (2005): 91–93. 118.  Boddy, Boxing, 113; see also Gorn, The Manly Art, 66–7, 172–76. 119.  Gorn, The Manly Art, 133–36; Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 118. 120.  Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 118; Riess, City Games, 172, 204. 121.  “Sporting Notes,” Philadelphia Record, April 14, 1885, 1. See also “The Sporting World,” Philadelphia Times, April 14, 1885, 2; and National Police Gazette, February 6, 1886, 10. 122.  “Great Kennel Wins,” Philadelphia Item, March 7, 1890, 5; see also Philadelphia Record, March 7, 1890, 2. 123.  Also noted by Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 645. 124.  Curtis Miner, “And They’re Off! Pennsylvania’s Horse Racing Tradition,” Pennsylvania Heritage 31, no. 2 (March 2005): 30; Frank Hamilton Taylor, The City of Philadelphia as It Appears in the Year 1893 (Philadephia: G. S. Harris & Sons, 1893), 128–29; on evidence of pools, see for example “Our Philadelphia Letter,” Chicago Horseman, May 28, 1885, 392. 125.  “Horse racing in Philadelphia does not flourish as in other cities, because the State laws do not permit pool selling or betting in any form. If betting were allowed that branch of sport would boom as well as in any other city” (Taylor, The City of Philadelphia, 128).

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126.  “Trotters escaped the disrepute heaped on galloping thoroughbreds and proved more practical to raise and maintain” (Miner, “And They’re Off!,” 29). 127.  John Durham, “Animal Locomotion,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, November 5, 1887, 1. 128.  Vosburgh, Famous American Jockeys, 44. 129.  Sporting Times, June 10, 1885, 8. 130.  Frederick Douglass, “Negro Portraits,” The Liberator, April 20, 1849, 62. 131.  Spirit of the Times, February 21, 1885, 111; “Lease of Belmont Park,” Sporting Life, February 25, 1885, 8. 132.  Spirit of the Times, February 21, 1885, 111. Similar sentiments appear in Index, “Our Philadelphia Letter,” Chicago Horseman, March 12, 1885, 93; and “The Prospects of the Spring Meetings in Philadelphia,” Sporting Life, March 11, 1885, 8. 133.  “Notes from Belmont Park,” Spirit of the Times, May 9, 1885, 445; “Our Philadelphia Letter,” Chicago Horseman, May 28, 1885, 392; Sporting Times, April 29, 1885, 8; Wallace’s Register 5 (1885): 228. 134.  “Sporting News,” National Police Gazette, August 29, 1885, 10. 135.  Samuel L. Boardman, Handbook of the Turf (New York: Orange Judd Co., 1895), 120. The earliest reference to the practice I have seen appears in Hiram Woodruff, The Trotting Horse of America (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1875), 288. 136.  “Was it Upon the Level?,” Sporting Life, August 19, 1885, 6; “Phallas v. Harry Wilkes,” Chicago Horseman, August 20, 1885, 762; “Harry Wilkes Downs Phallas,” Turf Farm and Field, August 21, 1885, 43; “I Am Now Satisfied,” National Police Gazette, September 5, 1885, 11. 137.  R. Tait McKenzie, “History of the Department of Physical Education,” Old Penn 11 (June 7, 1913): 1157; and Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 316. Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 644–47, has also explored the connections between Animal Locomotion and physical culture at Penn. 138.  Edward Rogers Bushnell, The History of Athletics at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Athletic Association of the University of Pennsylvania, 1909), 2:122. 139.  McKenzie, “History of the Department of Physical Education,” 1159; Bushnell, The History of Athletics at the University of Pennsylvania, 2:121.

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140.  Hatt, “Physical Culture,” 60; Gorn, The Manly Art, 185–89; Budd, The Sculpture Machine; Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 18 8 0 –192 0 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and James C. Wharton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). Gordon, Indecent Exposures, 69–70, also touches on boxing’s embourgeoisement during the Gilded Age. 141.  Mozley, “Introduction,” xvii; Haas, Muybridge, 112–14; Dick Skuse, ed., The Olympic Club of San Francisco, 1860–1960 (San Francisco: The Olympic Club, 1960). 142.  O’Reilly, The Ethics of Boxing, xvii. See also Michael Hatt, “Muscles, Morals, and Mind: The Male Body in Thomas Eakins’ Salutat,” in The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Adler and Marcia R. Pointon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 59–62. 143.  Welky, “Culture, Media and Sport,” 93; and Gorn, The Manly Art, 196, 199, 202–6, 223. 144.  O’Reilly, The Ethics of Boxing, 5. 145.  Moore, “Fine Specimens of Manhood,” 68; and Johnson, Black Manhattan, 65. 146.  Fox, The Black Champions of the Prize Ring, 6–7. See also Marjorie Alison Walter, “Fine Art and the Sweet Science: On Thomas Eakins, His Boxing Paintings, and Turn-of-the-Century Philadelphia” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1995), 167–70; and Welky, “Culture, Media and Sport,” 93–94. 147.  O’Reilly, The Ethics of Boxing, 84. 148.  “The Clarks at the Club,” Sporting Life, April 22, 1885, 7.

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Notes to Pages 98–99

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149.  Sporting Life, March 11, 1885, 7. 150.  Adelman, “The First Modern Sport in America,” 108; Hervey, American Harness Racing, 32; and Hamilton Busbey, The Trotting and Pacing Horse in America (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 275, 280. 151.  For example, Woodruff, The Trotting Horse of America, 40–41; and Peter C. Kellogg, The American Trotter (Boston: American Horse Breeder Publishing Co., 1905), 9, 235. See also John Ott, “Iron Horses: Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Industrialised Eye,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 407–28. 152.  “Laws of Motion,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 28, 1885, in Muybridge Scrapbook, 144. 153.  Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 640–4; Smith, Edge of Sight, 83–8. 154.  Of course, and as Marta Braun has skillfully demonstrated for decades, Muybridge employed all manner of legerdemain to effectively paper over lapses, omissions, and errors in the archive and thereby secure the project’s claims of scientificity. See “Muybridge’s Scientific Fictions,” Studies in Visual Communication 10 (1984): 2–21; Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 244–54. 155.  Charles E. Clay, “A Bout with the Gloves,” Outing 9:4–10:1 (January; February; April 1887): 359–367; 469–477; 26–31. 156.  Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory, 22; and Laffolet, Shadowboxing, 26. 157.  Schreiber & Sons, Portraits of Noted Horses (Philadelphia: n.p., 1874), frontispiece. See also “Obituary: George Francis Schreiber,” The Photographic Times, January 15, 1892, 26–7; and John Hervey, The American Trotter: A History of the Standard-Bred Horse (New York: Coward-McCann, 1947), 83. 158.  Line drawings based on the photographs appear in “Close Finishes at Sheepshead Bay,” Spirit of the Times, July 12, 1890, 1084–5. See also McDaniels, The Prince of Jockeys, 348. 159.  Tim Cresswell, “Black Moves: Moments in the History of African-American Masculine Mobilities,” Transfers 6, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 14. 160.  Smith, Photography on the Color Line, 3. See also pp. 7–12, and the works cited in n6. 161.  Celeste-Marie Bernier has hinted at this kind of interventionist approach in her reconsideration of stereotypical photographs of Black sitters such as  Zealy’s daguerreotypes for Louis Agassiz: “Men and women such as Gordon, Jem

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and Jack engaged in artful practices of self-revelation and concealment. Working from a position of concealment and isolation, they nonetheless testified to black agency, regardless of appropriating white contexts of production and dissemination” (“A ‘Typical Negro’ or a ‘Work of Art’?: The ‘Inner’ via the the ‘Outer Man’ in Frederick Douglass’s Manuscripts and Daguerreotypes,” Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 2 [June 2012]: 290). 162.  See, for example, Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts on 3 December 1861,” in Frederick Douglass Papers, vol. 3., ed. John Sekora and Darwin Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 452–73. 163.  Quoted in Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory, 23. See also Aycock and Scott, The First Black Boxing Champions, 53–54; Riess, City Games, 114; and Wiggins, “Peter Jackson,” 301. 164.  “Jim Crow had destroyed the extensive professional networks that had long given Black men security and made them markers of hope and racial pride” (Mooney, Race Horse Men, 245). See also Bond, “Jim Crow at Play,” 307–16; Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys, 323; and Saunders, Black Winning Jockeys, 101. 165.  “When jockeys began to earn ten to twenty thousand dollars a year and even more, forces against the Negro were set in motion and kept at work until he was excluded” (Johnson, Black Manhattan, 62). See also Saunders, Black Winning Jockeys, 103–4. 166.  Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory, 50; Bond, “Jim Crow at Play,” 10; Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys, 306; McDaniels, The Prince of Jockeys, 242; and Saunders, Black Winning Jockeys, 104–5. 167.  Weeks, The American Turf, 356–66. 168.  On jockeys, Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys, 301–3. Elsewhere, see Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 120; and Katz and Sugrue, W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and the City, 106–7.

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In dex

Abe Edgington (horse), 1, 9–10, 19 Adey, Peter, 54 African Americans: Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887), 103, 114n2; antidiscrimination laws, 64; Belmont Park, 61, 63, 96, 103; Black suffrage, 64; the Gilded Age, 53–54, 64–65; harness races, 60–61, 63; Muybridge, Eadweard, 85, 103; Philadelphia, 54–55, 61–66, 69, 75–76, 77, 102–3; photography, 55, 78, 103–4, 127n161; physiognomies, 95–96; pugilism, 62–63, 65; social mobilities, 5, 53–55, 60, 75, 77–79, 83–84, 102–4, 114n22; Spencer, Frank, 86; Spirit of the Times (newspaper), 60; stereotypes, 84–87, 91, 93, 95; thoroughbred races, 65, 94, 105; transportation, 61, 64, 103; University of Pennsylvania, 64, 69, 103; white bodies, 103. See also Black athletes; Black boxers; Black jockeys; Black mobilities; Jim Crow; race Allen, Harrison, 86–87 Alta California (magazine), 14, 18

American Progress (Gast) (painting), 30–31 American seat, 70–71, 90 American Turf, The (Davis) (1907), 79 American Turf, The (Weeks) (1898), 73–74, 78, 104–5 Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887): African Americans, 103, 114n2; Annie G. (horse), 58fig., 69–70, 72fig.; Bailey, Ben, 53, 56–57, 63, 66, 75–76, 87–88, 93, 100, 104; Black athletes, 53–56, 66, 68–84, 87, 102–5; Black boxers, 54, 63; Black jockeys, 53–54, 66, 71, 73, 105; Black mobilities, 55, 75, 102–3; Brown, Elspeth, 115n5; Dover Books/motion studies of animals, 3; Lizzie M. (horse)/Nellie Rose (horse), 97; nakedness, 98; race, 53–54, 55, 63, 66, 85–87; thoroughbred races, 94; white bodies, 53. See also individual plates animals. See motion studies of animals “Animals and Movements, Horses, Canter; saddle; gray horse Smith” (plate), 94–95

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“Animals and Movements, Horses, Gallop; thoroughbred bay mare, Annie G” (plate), 69–70, 72fig. Animals in Motion (Muybridge) (1899), 3 Annie G. (horse): Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887), 58fig., 69–70, 72fig.; Black jockeys, 56, 66, 69–70, 91, 102, 105; grids, 100–101; Sally Travers (horse), 57–59 artistic practices and horses, 29–31 artwork in classical tradition, 79–83, 94–95, 98, 102 Ashe, Arthur, 73 athletes, 2–3. See also Black athletes; individual athletes Attitudes of Animals in Motion (Muybridge) (1881), 3 automobilities, 12–13 Bailey, Ben: Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887), 53, 56–57, 63, 66, 75–76, 87–88, 93, 100, 104; Black boxers, 62–63; Brown, Toby (a.k.a. Tony), 69; Clark, John H., 99; criminalities, 93, 102; Domino, 92–93; grids, 35, 100–101, 123n96; Jim Crow, 53; masculinities, 87–88; as mixed-race, 53, 56, 75–76, 95; Muybridge, Eadweard, 35, 56–57, 75–77, 82–83, 86, 87; nakedness, 56; Philadelphia, 83; physiognomies, 86–88, 90, 95, 102; race, 84, 86–87, 93, 96; scientificities, 100–101, 102; social mobilities, 77–78; Spirit of the Times (newspaper), 83, 95; universities, 69, 75; white boxers, 63, 65, 93, 102 Bailey, John B., 75, 76fig. Bair, W. W., 96–97 Baldwin, E. J. “Lucky,” 60, 73–74 Barbezat, Debra, 66 Barnes, Shelby “Pike,” 67

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Barthes, Roland, 21 baseball, 66 Belmont Park: African Americans, 61, 63, 96, 103; Black athletes, 96; Black jockeys, 56–57, 59–60, 69, 72, 96; criminalities/wagers, 94, 96–97; horses, 57–58; scientificities, 96, 99–100 Benjamin, Walter, 11, 21. See also constellation of mobility Bernier, Celeste-Marie, 55 Black athletes, 68–84; Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887), 53–56, 66, 68–84, 87, 102–5; artwork in classical tradition, 102; Belmont Park, 96; discrimination, 66; the Gilded Age, 83–84; Jim Crow, 77, 84; locomotions, 102; Murphy, Isaac, 73; Muybridge, Eadweard, 68–69, 96, 102; physiognomies, 102; race, 78, 84–91; social mobilities, 5, 54, 77–79, 83–84; stereotypes, 55–56, 102; University of Pennsylvania, 96 Black boxers: African Americans as, 92–93; Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887), 54, 63; artworks of, 81, 83; Bailey, Ben, 62–63; Brown, Elspeth, 115n5; criminalities, 93; the Gilded Age, 53–54; Gladiators of the Prize Ring (Edwards), 67; mixed-race, 63, 67–68, 77; Ott, John, 5, 35; race, 83, 84–85, 114n2; scientificities, 99; social mobilities, 5, 78–79, 83; stereotypes, 84–85, 87; universities, 75; white boxers, 62–63, 67–68, 83, 93, 102, 104. See also individual boxers Black jockeys: the American seat, 70–71, 90; The American Turf (Weeks), 73; Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887), 53–54, 66, 71, 73, 105; Annie G.

Index

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(horse), 56, 66, 69–70, 91, 102, 105; Belmont Park, 56–57, 59–60, 69, 72, 96; Celebrated Winning Horses and Jockeys of the American Turf (Currier & Ives) (print), 67; census data, 66; decline of, 104–5, 128n165; the Gilded Age, 54, 71, 105; harness races, 60–61; integrity of, 79, 104; Jim Crow, 60, 105; Jockey Club, 105; Kentucky Derby, 72–73; Ott, John, 5; physiognomies, 91–92; race, 83–84, 90–91, 96; skills, 72–75; social mobilities, 5, 53–54, 79, 83–84, 120nn63,65; Spirit of the Times (newspaper), 72, 92; stereotypes, 90–91; thoroughbred races, 90; The Undefeated Asteroid (Troye) (painting), 71–72. See also harness races Black mobilities, 54–55, 75, 102–4, 114n2. See also social mobilities: African Americans Black suffrage, 64 Boardman, Samuel L., 97 Boden, Mike, 65, 93 Bouquet (horse), 59 “Bout with the Gloves, A” (Clay) (article), 101 Boxer, The (Donoghue) (sculpture), 79–80 boxers. See Black boxers; pugilism; white boxers; individual boxers Bradley, Milton, 85–86 Braun, Marta, 86, 127n154 Brooke, John, 88 Brown, Elspeth, 35, 54, 85–86, 115n5 Brown, Toby (a.k.a. Tony), 69, 99 Brown Dick (jockey), 71–72 Bryson, Norman, 21–27 “Building the Physical Side of College Men” (McKenzie) (manifesto), 88–90 Bush, George W., 50

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cabinet cards, 3, 39 Cameron, Bennehan, 58–59 cancan, the (dance), 22–25, 26 Catto, Octavius, 64 Celebrated Winning Horses and Jockeys of the American Turf (Currier & Ives) (print), 67, 92 Chahut, Le (Seurat) (painting), 22–24 Chambers, Arthur, 101 Chicago Horseman (newspaper), 61 Chicago Tribune (newspaper), 73 “Child with infantile paralysis walking on hands and feet” (Muybridge) (plate), 46fig. China, 48 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 50 Cincinnati Enquirer (newspaper), 81 Clark, John H., 56, 84, 93, 99 Clay, Charles E., 101 Cleveland Gazette, 83 Cloyd, William N., 74–75 collotype plates, 3, 54. See also individual collotype plates Coney Island Jockey Club, 101–2 constellation of mobility: artistic practices and horses, 29–31; automobilities, 12–13; Cresswell, Tim, 4, 11–13; grids, 41; horse photographs, 11; mobility studies, 11–12; Muybridge, Eadweard, 11, 20–21, 22, 29–30, 44; pathological human mobilities, 47; scholarship, 21; Stanford, Leland, 20; surveillance, 51; travels, 12–13, 20. See also Bryson, Norman; Hacking, Ian Cook, Thomas, 26 Cooper, Albert, 73–74, 78 copyrights, 39 Corbett, Jim, 62–63, 65 Crary, Jonathan, 39 Cresswell, Tim, 3–5, 9–10, 11–13, 54

Index

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criminalities, 47, 93–94, 96–97, 102 cultures of mobility, 4, 9–11, 13 Currier & Ives, 67, 84–85 Daisy (horse), 69, 71fig., 91 dance, 22–25, 26 Darktown Race—Facing the Flag, A (Currier & Ives) (lithograph), 84–85 Davis, John, 79 Dead Head Hill, 65–66 Department of Physical Education (at UPenn), 88–89, 97–98 Dixon, George: “A Lesson in Boxing” (pamphlet), 68, 75, 78, 101; scientificities, 99; Skelly, Jack, 83, 92, 104; social mobilities, 77, 78, 83; stereotypes, 85, 87 Donoghue, John, 79–80 Douglass, Frederick, 55, 78, 83, 96, 104 Dover Books, 3 dromologies, 51–52 Du Bois, W. E. B., 55, 77, 78, 103–4 Durcum, Francis X., 46 Eakins, Thomas, 44, 98 “Education: Is There No Middle Course?” (Nast) (cartoon), 88–90, 102 Edwards, Billy, 67, 101 Equal Protection Clause, 64 Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport, The (O’Reilly), 79–81, 101 Fairntosh farm, 58–59 Famous American Jockeys (Vosburgh), 81 Fifteenth Amendment, 64 Forester, Frank, 60, 91 Fox, Richard, 62, 65, 99 France, 25–26. See also cancan, the (dance) Front and side view of Malayan Man (Lamprey) (photograph), 36fig., 86 fugues, 25–26

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gait analysis, 47–48, 51 gambling. See wagers Gans, Joe, 104 Garb, Tamar, 79 Gast, John, 30–31 Gerker, Fred M., 97 Gilbreth, Frank and Lillian, 43 Gilded Age, the: African Americans, 53–54, 64–65; Black athletes, 83–84; Black boxers, 53–54; Black jockeys, 54, 71, 105; physiognomies, 88–89; race, 53–54, 64, 77, 105 Gladiators of the Prize Ring (Edwards), 67 Gloucester racetrack, 61 Godfrey, George, 62–63 Gordon, Sarah, 43–44 Gorn, Elliott, 65 “Great Race Between Peytona and Fashion, for $20,000!!!” (artwork), 29–30 grids, 31–42; Annie G. (horse), 100–101; Bailey, Ben, 35, 100–101, 123n96; constellation of mobility, 41; Cresswell, Tim, 4; cultures of mobility, 4; horse photographs, 1, 10–11, 13, 17, 19, 27, 31–32, 38–42; horses, 4; Kouwenhoven, John, 40; Krauss, Rosalind, 37–38, 40; Lamprey, John, 35–36; land/ maps, 34–35, 36–37; logistics, 52; mobilities, 38–39, 42; modern art, 37–38; modernities, 33, 34, 38, 40; motion studies of animals, 40; motion studies of humans, 31–32, 38, 40; Muybridge, Eadweard, 17, 31–36, 38–42, 86; numbers, 1, 13, 17, 19, 31–35, 38, 40–42; race, 35; scientificities, 17, 34, 35, 38, 42, 44–45, 48, 100–101; spaces, 31–35, 38, 39–41, 52; surveillance, 48, 49fig.

Index

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Hacking, Ian, 21, 25–27, 29–30 Haggin, James, 73–74 Hamilton, Tony, 67, 72, 90, 91 Haney, H.G., 58–60 Hannah, Matthew, 38 harness races, 60–61, 63. See also Black jockeys Harper’s New Monthly (newspaper), 78 Harper’s Weekly (newspaper), 72, 89 Harry Wilkes (horse), 97 Hash Machine (zoetrope strip), 85–87 Haupt, Lewis M., 43–44 Hearst, George, 60, 73–74 Hemment, J.C., 101–2 Hershberg, Theodore, 76 Hewlett, Aaron Molineaux, 75 Higgins, Hannah, 38 Homestead Act of 1862, 35 Horse and Horsemanship (Forester), 60, 91 “Horse in Motion, The. ‘Abe Edgington, owned by Leland Stanford; driven by C. Marvin, trotting at a 2:24 gait over the Palo Alto track, 15th June 1878” (plate), 1, 9–10 “Horse in Motion, The. ‘Sallie Gardner,’ owned by Leland Stanford; running at 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto Track, 19th June 1878,” 41fig. horse photographs, 9–11, 38–43; constellation of mobility, 11; cultures of mobility, 9–11; grids, 1, 10–11, 13, 17, 19, 27, 31–32, 38–42; mobilities, 11, 27, 43; modernities, 27; skepticism of, 15–17. See also Muybridge, Eadweard: techniques; individual horse photographs horserace coverage, 65, 101–2 horseraces, 66, 101–2, 124n125. See also harness races; thoroughbred races; wagers

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horses: artistic practices, 15, 29–31; Belmont Park, 57–58; centrality of, 20, 27–29, 39, 40; as cyborgs, 28–29; grids, 4; mobilities, 29–31; numbers, 19, 31–32. See also individual horses Hotaling, Edward, 60 “How Salvator Won” (Wilcox) (poem), 83–84 Hughes, James, 66 Human Figure in Motion, The (Muybridge) (1901), 3 Huxley, Henry, 35 Industrial Revolution, 22, 24–25, 29 Ingold, Tim, 33, 38 Jackson, Peter: California Athletic Club, 75, 81; Douglass, Frederick, 83; Johnson, James Weldon on, 78, 83; physiognomies, 81–82, 95–96; race, 87, 96, 120n71; scientificities, 99; stereotypes, 87; white boxers, 62–63, 65 Jerome Park (racetrack), 65–66 Jim Crow: African Americans, 128n164; Bailey, Ben, 53; Black athletes, 77, 84; Black jockeys, 60, 105; photography, 55; social mobilities, 55, 77 Jockey Club, 90, 105 jockeys. See Black jockeys; harness races John B. Bailey, Professor of Sparring and Gymnastics (print), 76fig. Johnson, Jack, 104 Johnson, James Weldon, 78, 83, 119n56 Joullin, Amédée, 81, 88 Kansas City Star (newspaper), 92 Kentucky Derby, 72, 73, 104–5 Koch, John, 16–17 Kouwenhoven, John, 40 Krauss, Rosalind, 37–38, 40

Index

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Lamprey, John, 35–36, 47, 86 landscapes, 2, 14, 30 Lane, Roger, 66, 93 Lawson, Bill E., 55 “Lesson in Boxing, A” (Dixon) (pamphlet), 68, 75, 78, 101 Lewis, J. Howard and W. H., 58–59 LeWitt, Sol, 39 Lizzie M. (horse), 97 locations, 12 locomotions, 1–2, 7, 20, 102 logistics, 52 Mad Travelers (Hacking), 25–27 Malayan men images, 35–36, 86 Manual of Coaching, A (Pepper), 60 “Man Walking Up Stairs, A” (plate), 31–32 Marquess of Queensberry Rules, 99–100, 101 masculinities, 44–45, 81–82, 87–88, 98, 102 Maud S. (horse), 57, 100 McCormick, Evelyn, 88 McDowell, William, 56–57 McKenzie, R. Tait, 88–89 McLain, William, 97–98 McShane, Clay, 28 men, 2–3, 44–45, 46, 79–81, 94. See also masculinities; motion studies of humans Mercator, Gerardus, 36 migration, 5, 7 mixed-race: Bailey, Ben as, 53, 56, 75–76, 95; Black boxers, 63, 67–68, 77; Celebrated Winning Horses and Jockeys of the American Turf (Currier & Ives) (print), 67; Du Bois, W. E. B., 77; Philadelphia, 75–76; pugilism, 56, 65 mobilities, 9–52; Adey, Peter, 54; American Progress (Gast) (painting),

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30–31; Barthes, Roland, 21; Bryson, Norman, 27; CODA, 42–52; Cresswell, Tim, 54; definitions of, 12; dromologies, 51–52; grids, 38–39, 42; Hacking, Ian, 27; horse photographs, 11, 27, 43; horses, 29–31; mobility studies, 9; modernities, 43; motion v, 3–4; Muybridge, Eadweard, 27, 42–44, 46–47; pathological human mobilities, 46–47, 48, 51, 53; power, 4, 12, 54; railroads, 43–44; surveillance, 47–52; Taylorism, 43; travels, 43; warfare, 50–51. See also Black mobilities; social mobilities mobility studies and theories, 9, 11–12 modern art, 37–38 modernities: grids, 33, 34, 38, 40; horse photographs, 27; mobilities, 43; Ott, John, 4 Mondrian, Piet, 38 Mooney, Katherine, 53–54 Moore, Louis, 99 motion studies: athletes, 2–3; men, 2–3, 44–45, 46; Muybridge, Eadweard, 1–4, 7, 14, 20; social kinetics, 24–25; women, 2–3, 44–45, 46 motion studies of animals: Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887), 3, 53; grids, 40; Muybridge, Eadweard, 2–3, 44, 57; RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips, 49; Stanford, Leland, 20. See also individual horses; individual titles motion studies of humans: Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887), 53; grids, 31–32, 38, 40; Muybridge, Eadweard, 4–5, 44; Ott, John, 42; pathological human mobilities, 46–47, 48, 51, 53; scientificities, 44–45; white bodies, 4–5 motion v mobilities, 3–4

Index

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“Movements, Male, Heaving a 75-lb. rock” (plate), 69–70, 86–87 “Movements, Male, Striking a blow (right hand)” (plate), 87–88 mulattos. See mixed-race Muldoon, William, 79 Murphy, Isaac: American seat, 70–71; artwork in classical tradition, 94–95; Black athletes, 73; Celebrated Winning Horses and Jockeys of the American Turf (Currier & Ives) (print), 67; Famous American Jockeys (Vosburgh), 81; integrity of, 72–73, 79, 81; Johnson, James Weldon, 119n56; masculinities, 81; physiognomies, 91–92; race wins, 119n54; social mobilities, 77; Spirit of the Times (newspaper), 73, 79; stereotypes, 95; thoroughbred races, 90; Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 83–84, 101–2 Muybridge, Eadweard: African Americans, 85, 103; Bailey, Ben, 35, 56–57, 75–77, 82–83, 86, 87; Black athletes, 68–69, 96, 102; constellation of mobility, 11, 20–21, 22, 29–30, 44; copyrights, 39; fame, 9, 19; grids, 17, 31–36, 38–42, 86; journalists as witnesses, 1, 17–19; landscapes, 2, 14; locomotion, 7; masculinities, 98; migration, 5, 7; mobilities, 27, 42–44, 46–47; motion studies, 1–4, 7, 14, 20; motion studies of animals, 2–3, 44, 57; motion studies of humans, 4–5, 44; nakedness, 2, 4–5, 44, 56, 98; name changes, 6; numbers, 1, 13, 17, 33–35; Ott, John, 3–5; pathological human mobilities, 46–47, 48; physical culture, 98; pugilism, 99; scientificities, 32–34, 42, 44–45, 100, 127n154; spaces, 31–35, 39–42; Stanford, Leland, 1–2, 9, 13–15, 17, 98, 107n1; surveillance, 43, 48, 52; techniques,

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1, 2, 13–15, 17–19, 33; travels of, 5–7; University of Pennsylvania, 2–3, 42, 44, 46, 53, 55, 56, 85, 86, 98; white bodies, 4–5, 94. See also horse photographs; individual titles “Muybridge 1” (LeWitt) (artwork), 39 Nahl, Arthur and Charles, 98 nakedness: Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887), 98; artwork, 79, 94, 98; Bailey, Ben, 56; Eakins, Thomas, 98; Muybridge, Eadweard, 2, 4–5, 44, 56, 98; scientificities, 44–45; women, 2, 44–45, 46. See also motion studies of humans Narberth, 55, 56, 103. See also Belmont Park Nast, Thomas, 88–90, 102 National Association of Trotting Horse Breeders, 99–100 National Police Gazette, The, 65, 67–68, 92, 97 National Trotting Association, 99–100 Nellie Rose (horse), 97 New Orleans Times-Democrat (newspaper), 104 New York Times (newspaper), 90 niches, 25–26, 27, 29–30 “Nude Woman Turning Around in Surprise and Running Away” (plate), 45fig. numbers: grids, 1, 13, 17, 19, 31–35; horses, 19, 31–32; Muybridge, Eadweard, 1, 13, 17, 33–35; scientificities, 33–35, 38, 40–42 Occident (horse), 14–19, 21, 28, 42 “Occident. Owned by Leland Stanford. Driven by Jas. Tennant, 1877” (photograph), 14–17 “Occident Trotting” (Koch), 16–17 Olympic Club, 98, 104

Index

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O’Reilly, John Boyle, 79–81, 88, 98–99, 101 Ott, John: Black boxers, 5, 35; Black jockeys, 5; Black mobilities, 114n2; Cresswell, Tim v, 9; modernities, 4; motion studies of humans, 42; Muybridge, Eadweard, 3–5; Stanford, Leland, 20, 33. See also race Outing (magazine), 101

pugilism: African Americans, 62–63, 65; legalities, 93; Marquess of Queensberry Rules, 99–100, 101; mixedrace, 56, 65; scientificities, 42, 98–102; University of Pennsylvania, 93, 96, 97–99; wagers, 98–99. See also Black boxers; white boxers; individual boxers Pultz, John, 38

Paris Exposition (1900), 77 pathological human mobilities, 46–47, 48, 51, 53 pattern of life analysis, 50–51 Pepper, William, 60 Phallas (horse), 57, 97 Philadelphia: African Americans, 54–55, 61–66, 69, 75–76, 77, 102–3; Bailey, Ben, 83; criminalities, 93, 97; horseraces, 124n125; wagers, 93–94, 124n125. See also University of Pennsylvania; individual locations Philadelphia Bulletin (newspaper), 94 Philadelphia Inquirer (newspaper), 69, 100 Philadelphia Item (newspaper), 93 Philadelphia Times (newspaper), 65, 82–83 Phipps, C. B., 96–97 photography, 55, 78, 79–81, 94, 103–4, 127n161. See also individual photographs Photography on the Color Line (Smith), 103 physiognomies, 86–92, 95–96, 102 Pierre Lorillard Tobacco Company, 68 Plessy v. Ferguson, 104 Polished Off. “Golly—he’s licked!!” (Currier & Ives) (lithograph), 84 Portraits of Noted Horses (Schreiber), 101 Potts, Alex, 87–88 power, 4, 12, 54 Ptolemy, 36–37

race, 53–105; Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887), 53–54, 55, 63, 66, 85–87; Bailey, Ben, 84, 86–87, 93, 96; Black athletes, 78, 84–91; Black boxers, 83, 84–85, 114n2; Black jockeys, 83–84, 90–91, 96; competition, 60–65; critical race studies, 4–5; discrimination, 66; Du Bois, W. E. B., 77; gamblers, 66; the Gilded Age, 53–54, 64, 77, 105; grids, 35; grooms, 91; Horse and Horsemanship (Forester), 91; Jackson, Peter, 87, 96, 120n71; Lamprey, John, 47, 86; mixed performances, 65–68; national defects of his, 84–96; Ott, John, 4–5; Photography on the Color Line (Smith), 103; physiognomies, 96; scientificities, 96–102; social mobilities, 55, 78; Spencer, Frank, 86; stereotypes, 84–87, 93; surveillance/warfare, 51; white bodies, 86–87; a white-colored man, 68–84. See also African Americans; mixed-race Race Horse Men (Mooney), 53–54 railroads, 4, 12–13, 20, 27–28, 30–31, 43–44 Record (newspaper), 65 RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips, 48–51 Riess, Steven, 65, 92

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Index

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Rogers, Fairman, 60 Roosevelt, Theodore, 98 Sallie Gardner (horse), 19, 40, 41fig. Sally Travers (horse), 57–58 Salvator (horse), 83–84, 101–2 Sandow, Eugen, 79, 81–82, 88, 95 “Sandow, the Imperfect Man” (Langford) (illustration), 81–82, 95 San Francisco Examiner (newspaper), 81–82, 85, 95 San Francisco Post (newspaper), 17 Sargent, Dudley Allen, 88 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 43 Schreiber, George Francis, 101 scientificities: Bailey, Ben, 100–101, 102; Belmont Park, 96, 99–100; Black boxers, 99; grids, 17, 34, 35, 38, 42, 44–45, 48, 100–101; motion studies of humans, 44–45; Muybridge, Eadweard, 32–34, 42, 44–45, 100, 127n154; nakedness, 44–45; numbers, 33–35, 38, 40–42; pugilism, 42, 98–102; race, 96–102; Stanford, Leland, 14, 100; Taylorism, 43, 47; University of Pennsylvania, 42, 100–101 Scott, James C., 34 Security Today (magazine), 48 Sennett, Richard, 34 Seurat, Georges, 22–23 Sheepshead Bay, 101–2 Simms, Willie, 70–71 Skelly, Jack, 83, 92, 104 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 54, 55, 63, 77, 85–86, 103, 114n2 social kinetics, 24–25, 27 social mobilities: African Americans, 5, 53–55, 60, 75, 77–79, 83–84, 102–4, 114n22; Bailey, Ben, 77–78; Black

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athletes, 5, 54, 77–79, 83–84; Black boxers, 5, 78–79, 83; Black jockeys, 5, 53–54, 79, 83–84, 120nn63,65; Dixon, George, 77, 78, 83; Jim Crow, 55, 77; Murphy, Isaac, 77; photography, 55; race, 55, 78. See also Black mobilities Solnit, Rebecca, 14 spaces: grids, 31–35, 38, 39–41, 52; horse photographs, 9–10; locations, 12; motions, 3–4, 39; Muybridge, Eadweard, 31–35, 39–42; Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 43; surveillance, 51–52. See also time-space compression Spencer, Frank, 86 Spirit of the Times (newspaper): African Americans, 60; Bailey, Ben, 83, 95; Belmont Park, 96–97; Black jockeys, 72, 92; horserace coverage, 65; Murphy, Isaac, 73, 79 Spooks (BBC), 48, 49fig. Sporting Life (newspaper), 84, 99 Stanford, Leland: constellation of mobility/motion studies of animals, 20; Muybridge, Eadweard, 1–2, 9, 13–15, 17, 98, 107n1; Ott, John, 20, 33; railroads, 20; scientificities, 14, 100. See also individual horse photographs; individual horses Stanton, John A., 81–82, 88 stereotypes, 55–56, 84–87, 90–91, 93, 95, 102 Stewart, Charles, 78 Stillman, J.D.B., 33 Sullivan, John L., 62–63, 79–81, 88 surveillance, 13, 26, 43, 47–52 Taber, Isaiah West, 82 Tablet, The (newspaper), 18–19 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 43, 47

Index

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Taylorism, 25, 43, 47 Tennant, Jas., 15fig., 16–17 Tenny (horse), 101–2 thoroughbred races, 65, 66, 90, 94, 105. See also individual jockeys time-space compression, 2, 4, 20, 27–28, 43–44 travels, 5–7, 12–13, 20, 25–27, 43 Trotting Cracks of Philadelphia Returning from the Race at Point Breeze Park (Pharazyn) (lithograph), 61–62 Troye, Edward, 71–72 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 30 Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S. A. (Du Bois), 78, 103 Undefeated Asteroid, The (Troye) (painting), 71–72 United Kingdom, 26, 35, 49–50, 70 University of Pennsylvania: African Americans, 64, 69, 103; Black athletes, 96; Department of Physical Education, 88–89, 97–98; harness races, 60; McKenzie, R. Tait, 88–89; Muybridge, Eadweard, 2–3, 42, 44, 46, 53, 55, 56, 85, 86, 98; pugilism, 93, 96, 97–99; scientificities, 42, 100–101 US Department of Homeland Security, 50 vagrancies, 26 Virilio, Paul, 51–52 Vosburgh, W. S., 81

138

63146_txt.indd 138

wagers, 66, 93–94, 96–97, 98–99, 124n125 Waitrix (company), 48. See also surveillance Walker, Frances, 38 Waln, Robert, 78–79 warfare, 50–51 Watkins, Dal, 85 Watson, Andy, 75 Watt, James, 29 Weeks, Lyman Horace, 73–75, 78, 92, 104 “What’s American about America” (Kouwenhoven), 40 White, J. William, 97 white bodies: African Americans, 103; Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) (1887), 53; artwork in classical tradition, 81–83, 94; masculinities, 81–82, 87–88; motion studies of humans, 4–5; Muybridge, Eadweard, 4–5, 94; race, 86–87 white boxers: artwork in classical tradition, 79–82; Bailey, Ben, 63, 65, 93, 102; Black boxers, 62–63, 67–68, 83, 93, 102, 104; Jackson, Peter, 62–63, 65; masculinities, 81–82. See also individual boxers Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 83–84, 101–2 Williams, Henry, 76 Williams, Tony, 105 Willis, Deborah, 55 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 81 women, 2–3, 44–45, 46. See also motion studies of humans Woodson, Harry, 81

Index

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