jonyorkblog:

Anton Giulio Bragaglia, courtesy of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Bow 1, Un Gesto del Capo, The Bow 2, The Slap, The Typist, Change of Position, The Smoker – The Match – The Cigarette, 1911

The Rome-based theatre director, set designer and cinematographer Anton Giulio Bragaglia was one of the many artists influenced by F. T. Marinetti’s theories included in his publication Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, which heralded the Italian Futurist movement in 1909. The poet’s writing espoused a love of danger, the beauty of speed, the glory of war, and the destruction of museums and libraries. A year later, the artists who were Marinetti’s peers had worked out the implications of these tenets in their own manifestos. In Bragaglia’s essay Futurist Photodynamism—a response to Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism—written in 1911 and published two years later, Bragaglia extended the concept of dynamism to photography. Like the painters who attempted to reproduce the sensation of dynamism rather than to create a fixed moment, Bragaglia sought to replace the objective reality of a subject captured in an instantaneous snapshot with a projection of the subject’s interior essence, which he identified as pure movement.

In this photodynamic series (above) it is neither the beginning of the action in each shot nor its conclusion—nor any stage in between—that is significant, but rather the trajectory created by the sweeping arc of continuous, fluid motion, resulting in the dissolution, or dematerialization, of the subject.

Bragaglia described the trajectory of motion:

…that which exerts a fascination over our senses, the vertiginous lyrical expression of life, the lively invoker of the magnificent dynamic feeling with which the universe incessantly vibrates.

weepling:

Martine Murray, How to Make a Bird