"After Muybridge"

I discovered the work of 19th-C. photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the library and was fascinated by his freezing of the motion of a running horse to settle a wealthy man's wager. Being a very urban sort, I was never really a horse photographer but while working for the Kentucky Derby Festival in the late '80's-early '90's I loved hanging around Churchill Downs for those two weeks in late April before the Derby.

Originally, I was looking for that perfect frozen moment of the hooves all off the ground simultaneously, and was failing miserably. But when looking at the contact sheets, a different possibility jumped off the pages: a more expressionistic depiction of the speed and motion of the racehorses through the long exposures necessitated by the low pre-dawn light. To make these, the motor-driven camera was loaded with slow film and shot hand-held at long exposures, panning with pumping legs and pounding hooves. The sequence itself became the object.