From the early prehistoric drawings in the Laseaux Caves of France through the modern computerized graphics of today, the horse has been used by artists as a subject for centuries.
Most recently, the use of the horse in photography has been explored in The Horse: Photographic Images, 1839 to the Present. The book, written by Gerald Lang, an associate professor in the University's School of Visual Arts, and Lee Marks, a photography art dealer and consultant, is a pictorial history of the image of the horse.
Lang said the book features 150 years of horse-related photography, along with an historical aspect that is dealt with in an introductory essay by horse historian Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence.
"As far as I know, the horse originally came in with the Indo European migrations of roughly 2000 to 1000 B.C.," said Arthur Goldschmidt Jr., professor of Middle East history.
Lang said the horse's resilience attracted him.
"It's fascinating to me that this animal still exists," he said. "We still find use for it. It's still a popular aspect of our culture and society."
Goldschmidt said society commonly used horses for warfare until the 20th century.
"The horse has enormous advantages in terms of mobility. Especially once they brought in the stirrup, which was a Chinese invention, the stirrup enabled them to stand up on horseback and shoot their arrows with their hands," Goldschmidt said. "That greatly increased the efficiency of the fighting men, yet it wouldn't have been possible without the mobility of the horse.
"The horse did not become, usually, the standard farm animal," Goldschmidt added. "Horses tended to be status symbols, mainly in the hands of the state or in the hands of officers or fighting men."
Nowadays, horse owners generally use their horses for recreation.
"In recent years, the horses are much more for leisure time activities," said John Frantz, associate professor of American history. "The horse is not as important any longer economically except with those groups such as the Amish, who don't believe in using gas-powered engines for transportation. They still use horse-drawn buggies today."
Lang, a frequent horse rider for the last 12 years, started working on the book with Marks a number of years ago after being captivated by the animal.
"I knew that there was . . . a lot of master photographers that used the horse as a subject in their photographs. It wasn't only those years that the horse was prevalent because of its use in transportation or whatever, but throughout the history of photography, right up to the present."
Published last year by Harry N. Abrahms of New York in association with the Palmer Museum of Art, the book traces horse photography from the arrival of the camera to the present. The book features photographs from such renowned photographers as Gustave Le Gray, Eadweard Muybridge, and Andy Warhol.
Early on, many cameras were large, tripod-mounted and slow to produce an exposure.
"The horse would have to stand still for 15 minutes," Lang said. "Any movement would cause a blur or, if the movement was drastic, the animal would disappear in part or entirely, so they were photographed very statically. Many times you can see the groom behind the animal, holding the animal still."
All the book's photographs were taken for the horses themselves. They are not just candid photographs that happen to contain horses.
"They're an integral part of what the photograph was and what it symbolizes," Lang said.
The book contains a number of standout photographs, including portraits of General Robert E. Lee and Jesse James on their respected steeds, Clark Gable trying to grab hold of a wild horse on the set of The Misfits and photographer O. Winston Links' poetic shot of a horse bowing to an oncoming train.
The book also includes a section of Muybridge's Animal Locomotion. Published in 1887, Muybridge put together over 20,000 individual exposures of various animals in stages of motion. The section included in the book is Muybridge's multi-exposure shots of the movement of a horse.
For centuries, artists had visualized a galloping horse in a "rocking-horse" configuration, with both front legs stretched out in front and both back legs stretched out in back at full gallop. Muybridge set out to prove this ideal wrong.
"You can go back and look at all of the paintings which pictured horses moving . . . many times you'll see them in a rocking-horse configuration," Lang said.
"It's very difficult to see, if you're talking about watching all four feet. Go out to the horse barns and watch all four feet. Try to figure out if all four feet at the gallop are off the ground at the same time."
Muybridge set up 12 cameras, which would be tripped electromagnetically when the horse ran past. The result was a series of exposures that froze the movement of the horse, showing all four feet were off the ground, but tucked in a position under the horse's belly.
Lang said he feels that anyone who reads the book, will come away with something special.
"I always hope that, whether it's in my photography class or whether it's in this book that somebody will take from this something, and it will enrich their lives in the process," Lang said.
