Muybridge and Mobility

Muybridge and Mobility is the latest addition to Defining Moments in Photography, the series from University of California Press that provides readers with pairs of essays on a given subject by scholars from wholly distinct academic disciplines. The previous volumes in the series have demonstrated the utility of situating these short pieces in a kind of conversational complementarity, and this latest volume reaffirms both the quality and range evidenced by previous titles. The two essays here, Tim Cresswell’s “Visualizing Mobility” and John Ott’s “Race and Mobility,” each illustrate the usefulness of mobility as an organizing framework for engaging with Eadweard Muybridge’s famous motion studies. Both scholars read Muybridge’s images as part of a network of mobility in its broadest sense, as a discursive formation profoundly connected to all other social and cultural domains. In this way, Muybridge and Mobility is both an excellent example of mobility studies in action and an accessible introduction to the basic structuring concepts of the field.