News at the IMC

A bold new facade for The Image Centre

The IMC’s west and north facade has been transformed with a brand-new photographic mural featuring Eadweard J. Muybridge’s iconic work Horse in Motion, part of his 1880s Animal Locomotion series. Muybridge’s pioneering work in “chronophotography” revealed motion through sequential images and laid the groundwork for cinema. Displayed prominently on TMU’s campus, this pivotal work symbolizes innovation, curiosity, and the creative spirit driving discovery.

This mural celebrates some of the most iconic images in the history of photography, from Eadweard J. Muybridge’s large corpus of pictures of horses in motion. Created in the mid-1880s as part of his pioneering Animal Locomotion series, these sequential photographs broke new ground by exposing how the body—animal or human—moves through space and time. Muybridge’s experiments in “chronophotography”—capturing movement through a rapid succession of exposures—were instrumental in laying the foundation for the development of cinema at the end of the 19th century. The mural’s placement on the TMU building shared by The School of Image Arts and The Image Centre makes this history especially resonant. Inside, students work fluidly across photography, film, and digital media, while The Image Centre presents exhibitions, hosts a major collection of photographs, and facilitates scholarly research in the history of the medium. Muybridge’s horse symbolizes the meeting point of still and moving images, reminding us that major breakthroughs emerge from curiosity, persistence, and a drive to see the world differently.

By bringing these striking images into the public realm, TMU shares both the history and the aspirations they carry, connecting photography’s past to its future while marking the building as a hub for creativity, research, and innovation.

The mural reverses Muybridge's original horse images as negatives, offering a contemporary take on these historic photographs.

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Q&A with IMC Director Paul Roth:

Why did you choose one of Muybridge's horses in motion as the subject for this project?

When thinking about the next public art mural for our building facade, we wanted something that reflected the creative activity happening inside. 

We chose this classic image of a horse galloping and leaping over hurdles from Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion series. These photographs, aimed at capturing movement over time, led to the invention of motion pictures.

Everyday, students in The Creative School experiment with images, moving fluidly between digital and analogue still photography, as well as film and digital video, to produce every kind of creative expression. 

The Image Centre, housed in the same building, is a world-class museum and research hub for photography that exhibits both still images and media arts. For this reason, Muybridge was perfect for this project. His work represents the connection between these two practices, and has become the world’s most recognizable metaphor for the birth of motion pictures from photography.

What is the historical importance of Muybridge's photographs? 

This photo, along with the many photographs he made capturing the movements of animals and humans in the passage of time, were revolutionary. 

Muybridge was first commissioned to photograph a horse in the 1870s by the wealthy American businessman Leland Stanford, who wanted to clearly see and understand the horse’s gallop—for example, were all four legs ever off the ground at the same time? 

To get the images Stanford wanted, Muybridge had to figure out how to capture motion using a technology that was very slow at the time. 

He came up with a whole methodology for doing this. He triggered a sequence of cameras one after the other on a constructed track as he staged different movements. Later, as his experiment expanded, Muybridge captured the motion of other animals, and humans too. 

When he put these sequential images together, they captured the full range of locomotion and were incredibly revealing. They led to a key discovery: images shown in rapid succession could create a convincing illusion of motion. 

So they became the forerunner to motion pictures, to videos, and ultimately to the images we all make on our smart phones.

Is there something particularly significant about this discovery, on a broader level? 

Yes. By providing irrefutable evidence that horses gallop with all four feet off the ground at once, these pictures captured something that you cannot see with the naked eye. His work proved that photography could expand human vision by revealing things that were impossible to see otherwise.

In other words, photography is more than a medium for recording what we see—it’s a medium for discovering what we cannot.

This makes Muybridge’s photographs particularly compelling at a research university, where our goal is to expand knowledge and discover what we couldn’t otherwise know.

What kind of impact will this installation have on the community? 

Public art installations like this one draw public attention. They have a way of making people stop and say, “What’s that about?” 

My hope is that people passing through TMU’s campus see and are struck by this amazing, dramatic image of a horse as it gallops and leaps across the building. 

If they already know this is an image by Muybridge, then what they see will be a clue about what’s happening inside—that there’s a museum of photo history, a school where students and their teachers make photographs and films, and a place where people think daily about cameras and images and how we can use them to represent and understand the world and our dreams.

Overall, our hope is that the mural prompts curiosity and discovery, inspiring people to explore the exhibitions and programs offered by The Image Centre and Image Arts at The Creative School.

What excites you most about this project? 

I find Muybridge to be one of the most endlessly interesting figures in the history of photography, and his pictures are always fascinating to look at and think about. I also love the idea of making a contemporary public artwork out of a historic photograph from the 19th century.

How long will this installation be displayed? 

The Image Centre’s building has hosted rotating public art installations for more than a decade. These installations typically stay up for several years before being replaced with new work.

The exterior wrap at the The Image Centre, called “The Horse in Motion,” is currently on display. The Image Centre is open to everyone within the TMU community and the general public.

- Excerpt from Lindsey Craig's article ‘The Horse in Motion’ gallops onto The Image Centre at TMU for Toronto Met Today. 

About The Image Centre

The Image Centre (IMC) is Canada’s leading institution dedicated to the exhibition, research and collecting of photography. Established in 2012 at Toronto Metropolitan University, in the heart of the city, the IMC welcomes visitors to explore the intersection of photography and culture. Through compelling exhibitions and engaging public programming, the IMC showcases work by emerging, renowned, and anonymous photographers, past and present. With a growing collection of nearly 400,000 photographic objects and an innovative scholarly research program, the IMC is also a vibrant hub for the preservation and study of photography. For more information, visit theimagecentre.ca.

About Toronto Metropolitan University

Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly known as Ryerson University, is Canada’s leader in innovative, career-oriented education. Urban, culturally diverse and inclusive, the University is home to more than 46,000 students, including 2,900 Master’s and PhD students, 4,000 faculty and staff, and 225,000 alumni worldwide. For more information, visit torontomu.ca.

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For media inquiries, please contact:
Kristen Dobbin, The Image Centre
kristendobbin@torontomu.ca