Eadweard Muybridge, Tate Britain

Trotting horses were only a small part of a fascinating story

Multiple images of silhouetted horses cantering against blank backgrounds in grids of movement are what most people associate with Eadward Muybridge. Made in the late 1880s, they have contributed to his lasting reputation as a pioneer of photography and the moving image. So it is astonishing to discover through Tate Britain’s magnificent exhibition of his life’s work, that horses were only part of a story packed with surprises.

Gregor Schneider: Fotografie und Skulptur, Sadie Coles HQ

The German artist creates House-of-Horror tableaux that are seriously creepy

Few artists can creep you out like Gregor Schneider. His work is scary and it’s absurd. But even as you giggle nervously when confronted with its less than subtle deployment of shock-horror tactics, a more profound disquiet creeps up on you. Schneider knows how to tap into our visceral fears.

theartsdesk in New York: Over the Sea to Art Getaway Island

Where prime real estate is given over to artists-in-residence

When it’s 33 degrees and rising, boarding a ferry in New York has to be a good plan. One of the newest and weirdest of the city’s watery destinations is Governors Island (no apostrophe - it was removed in 1783 when the British, who used it to house His Majesty’s Governors, surrendered it to New York state). It’s just 800 yards and 10 minutes away from Battery Park, with a terminal next to Staten Island’s, though the free ferry only runs on Fridays and weekends, when the island is open to the public. When the last ferry boat to New York leaves at seven - that is when there’s no evening concert: Roseanne Cash, She and Him and MIA played recently at the poetically named Watertaxi Beach - the island is completely empty.

Photo Gallery: A Century Apart, James Ravilious & John Wheeley Gutch

Cameras change, centuries pass, but photographers stay the same

Life changes at such speed in cities that it seems as if all the world must move at the same pace. Photographs prove otherwise. Looking at the two portfolios of West Country photographs below, you could surely not readily believe that more than a century separates them. James Ravilious's Devonian sheepfarmers and John Wheeley Gutch's Cornish fishermen have worked natural resources for centuries - the fact that the images lie 130 years apart are purely an indication that while technique changes, human interest does not.

 

James Ravilious

 

Futureproof: Scottish Photography Graduate Show, Glasgow

The new crop prove they can look to the future and learn from the past

To Futureproof is to ensure that we don’t become technologically obsolete, but keep in touch with as yet undeveloped technologies and exploit those already in the ether. It’s an apt title for this exhibition of work by 16 graduates from the five Scottish university photography departments. That most are already future-proofing themselves is apparent in their diverse approaches to their work.

theartsdesk in Madrid: City of Photography

The world's photographers descend on PhotoEspaña for a phenomenal feast

International photography festivals are rivalling rock festivals this summer - and rock festivals are featuring photographers. PhotoEspaña (PHE) Madrid beats the lot. Packed with surprise revelations, with central Madrid as the main stage, the fringe all around it, and the whole city involved in the Night of Photography PhotoMaratón, it’s a highly ambitious, even labyrinthine affair.

My Perspective: Down's Syndrome Photography Prize, Strand Gallery

Photographers with Down's syndrome challenge expectations

“There is a tradition of photographing people with Down’s syndrome, but not of positive, strong images of people staring back at you, challenging you to look at them. This exhibition reverses that. The images we produce are not sympathetic or sentimental, but strong and covering all aspects of life, and using contemporary photography to get our message across. We’ve turned the camera 180 degrees and now the former subjects are in control.”

Photo Gallery: Bolshoi Ballet class by Charlotte MacMillan

Principal dancer Dmitri Gruzdyev remembers his own schooling at the Kirov

Charlotte MacMillan took these exclusive pictures last week of the Bolshoi corps de ballet in class. The pictures brought back memories of his training to English National Ballet's Kirov-trained principal dancer Dmitri Gruzdyev, as he prepares to perform Michael Corder's Cinderella at the Coliseum next month. A regular coach for younger dancers after 17 years in the company, he has a keen eye for the training differences between his native land and his adopted country.

theartsdesk in Los Angeles: Dennis Hopper (RIP) On Show

A controversial new director at the Geffen Contemporary kicks off with a bang

While most will be familiar with him as an actor, and some will know him also as a photographer and painter, few will be aware of the full extent of the late Dennis Hopper’s artistic practice. Hopper, who died in May of this year, did everything from taking photographs of Dr Martin Luther King Jr during the historic Selma-Montgomery marches through producing oil paintings inspired by the scale of billboards to making pop-art assemblages, abstracts, and painting large-scale figures appropriated from commercial advertising.

Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life, 1834-1910, National Portrait Gallery

Portrait photographer to Victorian society has his first exhibition in a century

Camille Silvy may be the least recognised of all the great photographic innovators of the 19th century. After a decade of almost ceaseless technical innovation, and astonishing output as the society portrait-photographer of the 1860s, he abruptly closed his London studio, aged only 34, returned to France, and, after a brief stint in the garde mobile in the Franco-Prussian War, spent much of the rest of his life in and out of asylums.