Muybridge, Contortion, Yoga

In 1872 former California Governer, Leland Stanford, hired then-famous photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) to settle a bet about whether all four feet of a horse ever leave the ground at one time.

With Stanford’s backing, Muybridge invented new photographic processes to prove they did.

He then cataloged 100,000 human and animal actions over the three decades.

In 1887, he got around to contortionists, and, here, in plate 510 from his “Animal Locomotion” series, we see what looks like an advanced yoga asana practice.

To the untrained eye, there’s not much difference between contortion and yogasana, and they have intertwined histories.

Over the millennia, Kalaripayattu (Martial Arts), Bharat Natyam (Temple Dance), and Kridacakra (Circus Arts) all influenced one another in India.

It wasn’t beyond a yogi to steal a card from the performer’s deck and strike poses at streetside for alms.

The Indian eye has taken in both tricks and miracles side-by-side for centuries.

From the Muybridge Zoogyroscope, to Marey’s Chronophotography, motion picture technology was very near its first premiere in 1887.

118 years later, YouTube arrived. 123 years later: Instagram.

In the last 150 years, photography’s many platforms have helped bring yoga out of the cult and cave.

When Bava Lachman Das provided moving entertainment to picture-takers through his 1897 yoga presentation at London’s Westminster Aquarium, his activities were perceived as contortion, and, indeed, as cameramen and numberless live audiences took in similar exhibitions by B. K. S. Iyengar starting in the 1930s, the line between transformative and performative movement was blurred further.

Photography reveals both the trick of exertion and the miracle of realization.

It points to how Hatha Yoga joins both in a single frame.