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Hollis Frampton & Marion Faller

Eadweard Muybridge

Creative and romantic couple Hollis Frampton (Phillips Academy Class of 1954) and Marion Faller both pursued individual photographic practices while also collaborating in projects such as Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion (1975). This series, however, not only embodies the creative synergy of Frampton and Faller, but also pays homage to its conceptual instigator, Eadweard Muybridge, whose Animal Locomotion (1887) series provided the compositional framework for Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion. Frampton’s presence in several images alludes to the roles they each played in the making of the series—Frampton acting as stage director, Faller as photographer. The acknowledgement of joint authorship in this instance coincides with the decline of the nineteenth-century notion of ‘artist as genius’ and the rise of postmodernist critical frameworks such as Roland Barthes’s seminal 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author.” 

Hollis Frampton and Marion Faller

Hollis Frampton and Marion Faller

519. Tomatoes descending a ramp from Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion, 1975 gelatin silver print 1990.52.2 gift of Frank Stella (PA 1954)

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge

Plate 382. Lifting A Log on End from Animal Locomotion, 1887, Volume II, Males (Nude), 1872-1885 collotype 1984.6.102 gift of the Edwin J. Beinecke Trust

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