Latzman’s research focused on the figure of Margaret Tadd, one of several models that Muybridge photographed repeatedly. She was married to the photographer’s colleague, James Liberty Tadd, an art professor at the University of Pennsylvania, which commissioned and sponsored Muybridge’s work. For her research, Latzman visited the Eadweard Muybridge Collection at the university’s archives, as well as his studio (currently serving as a hospital building). The video is a fictional testimonial by Mrs. Tadd of her work with Muybridge, based on actual biographical details from their lives. Latzman, playing the role of Mrs. Tadd herself, uses imagination and fiction to present a possible feminine perspective on this seminal photographic event. This perspective was not only neglected in the history of early photography but was entirely absent from the original power relations between the photographer and his model, which obscured any unique features Mrs. Tadd may have had. The video was shot on Governors Island, New York.
Active in Muybridge’s time, this site played an important part in military history and therefore connotes masculinity and command.
In addition to the video, Latzman’s work includes a series of eight still photographs. Two of them are images of Mrs. Tadd from Muybridge’s original plates, but here they are presented in enlarged form and isolated from the locomotive sequence in which they were originally included. The titles remain almost identical to Muybridge’s, with one exception: the addition of the photographed woman’s first name, Margaret. This addition acknowledges Mrs. Tadd’s identity, which had been denied her before. The remaining images are of other female figures from Muybridge’s plates, but Latzman titled them all Mrs. Tadd, thereby turning her into a prototype of all models.
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