Exploring Movement Through Stasis, Paul Phung And Bruce Usher’s Ode To Muybridge

Phung’s work has been occupied with movement for some time; his interest initially piqued by a fashion editorial with TooGood, in which dancers were cast instead of models. Four years on, his work has grown—obsessively exploring the possibilities of photographic representation of movement,

For this project, Phung and Usher looked at the pioneering images of motion captured by Eadweard Muybridge. This famous series shows men, women, and animals engaged in acts of momentum at the turn of the century. In their ode to Muybridge, Phung and Usher enlisted contemporary dancer Harry Parr—and asked him to respond to words and emotions with movement. The resulting images are poised, but with a sense of gestural motion that has been enhanced by the unique finishes of each photograph. Printed in black and white on a thin paper, each photograph has had its edges folded to enhance the movements of Parr within the frame. In an interview with AnOther about this final act of folding, Usher remarked: “I wanted to emphasize the space around him, and the paper folds did that. I wanted it to feel like an artefact of movement.”