Take Two

It neither charges forward nor comes to a halt; it remains suspended in the midst of running. It recalls that elusive instant that Eadweard Muybridge sought to capture in the late nineteenth century—the moment when motion was severed from the continuity of time and transformed into something visible: the suspension of all four of a horse's hooves between earth and sky. It is as though the iron horse in this photograph, adorned with even greater splendor and veiled in a covering, waits in the courtyard of a house. It waits for its appointed moment to arrive, to step onto the stage, for the curtains to fall, and to perform a secondhand reenactment of that suspended instant.

Imagine that this apparition is that very horse from Muybridge's recorded sequence—the same legendary horse that, before coming to life in cinema, remained suspended in photography and all four of its hooves had left the ground.