Eadweard Muybridge
English photographer in the United States
1830 CE to 1904 CE
Eadweard James Muybridge (9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) is an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection.
He adoptd the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name.
He immigrates to the United States as a young man but remains obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, make him world famous.
Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which uses multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dates the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.
In his earlier years in San Francisco, Muybridge becomes known for his landscape photography, particularly of the Yosemite Valley.
He also photographes the Tlingit people in Alaska, and is commissioned by the United States Army to photograph the Modoc War in 1873.
In 1874 he shoots and kills Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover, and is acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide.
He travels for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition in 1875.
In the 1880s, Muybridge enters a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye cannot distinguish as separate movements.
He spends much of his later years giving public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences.
He also edits and publishes compilations of his work, which greatly influence visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography.
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The Far West
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Englishman Eadweard Muybridge establishes his reputation in 1867 with photos of the Yosemite Valley wilderness (some of which used the same scenes taken by his contemporary Carleton Watkins) and areas around San Francisco.
Muybridge quickly gains notice for his landscape photographs, which show the grandeur and expansiveness of the West; if human figures are portrayed, they are dwarfed by their surroundings, as in Chinese landscape paintings.
He signs and publishes his work under the pseudonym Helios, which he also uses as the name of his studio.
Born Edward James Muggeridge, he had left San Francisco in 1860 as a merchant, but returned in 1867 as a professional photographer, with highly proficient technical skills and an artist's eye.
He will use the surname "Muybridge" for the rest of his life.
He has rapidly become successful in photography, focusing principally on landscape and architectural subjects, as do other prominent men, when the West is the land of imagination.
He has converted a light carriage vehicle into a portable darkroom to carry out his work.
His business cards also advertise his services for portraiture.
His stereographs, the popular format of the time, are sold by various galleries and photographic entrepreneurs (most notably the firm of Bradley & Rulofson) on Montgomery Street, San Francisco's main commercial street during these years.
Edweard Muybridge travels to the newly acquired Alaska to photograph the native Tlingit, occasional Russian inhabitants, and dramatic landscapes for the U.S. government in 1868.
The Lighthouse Board has hired Eadweard Muybridge to photograph lighthouses of the American west coast in 1871.
From March to July, he travels aboard the Lighthouse Tender Shubrick to document these structures.
Eadweard Muybridge takes enormous physical risks to make his photographs, using a heavy view camera and stacks of glass plate negatives.
A spectacular stereograph he publishes in 1872 shows him sitting casually on a projecting rock over the Yosemite Valley, with two thousand feet of empty space yawning below him.
Muybridge has made a sequence of images of the he construction of the San Francisco Mint in 1870–1872, using the power of time-lapse photography to document changes in the building's progress over time.
In 1872, the former governor of California, Leland Stanford, a businessman and racehorse owner, hires Muybridge for some photographic studies.
Stanford has taken a position on a popularly debated question of the day—whether all four feet of a horse are off the ground at the same time while trotting.
The same question had arisen about the actions of horses during a gallop.
The human eye cannot break down the action at the quick gaits of the trot and gallop.
Up until this time, most artists paint horses at a trot with one foot always on the ground; and at a full gallop with the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear, and all feet off the ground.
Stanford sides with the assertion of "unsupported transit" in the trot and gallop, and decides to have it proven scientifically.
Stanford had sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.
Muybridge settles Stanford's question with a single photographic negative showing his Standardbred trotting horse Occident airborne at the trot.
This negative is lost, but the image survives through woodcuts made at the time (the technology for printed reproductions of photographs was still being developed).
In 1872 also, Muybridge marries Flora Shallcross Stone, a divorcee twenty-one years old, and half his age.
Edweard Muybridge is commissioned by the U.S. Army in 1873 to photograph the Modoc War in northern California and Oregon.
Many of his stereoscopic photos are published widely, and can still be found today.
The war ends with the deaths of half the small Modoc tribe and the transshipment of the remainder to Indian Territory.
Edweard Muybridge discovers in 1874 that his young wife Flora's friend, a drama critic known as Major Harry Larkyns, might have fathered their seven-month-old son Florado.
On October 17, he travels north of San Francisco to Calistoga to track down Larkyns.
Upon finding him, Muybridge says, "Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here's the answer to the letter you sent my wife", and shoots him point-blank.
Larkyns dies that night, and Muybridge is arrested without protest and put in the Napa jail.
Edweard Muybridge is tried for murder.
His defense attorney pleads insanity due to the severe head injury which Muybridge had suffered in the 1860 stagecoach accident.
At least four longtime acquaintances testify under oath that the accident had dramatically changed Muybridge's personality, from genial and pleasant to unstable and erratic.
During the trial, Muybridge undercuts his own insanity case by indicating that his actions were deliberate and premeditated, but he also shows impassive indifference and uncontrolled explosions of emotion.
The jury dismisses the insanity plea, but acquits the photographer on the grounds of "justifiable homicide", disregarding the judge's instructions.
The episode had interrupted his horse photography studies, but not his relationship with Stanford, who had arranged for his criminal defense.
Today, the court case and transcripts are important to historians and forensic neurologists, because of the sworn testimony from multiple witnesses regarding Muybridge's state of mind and past behavior.
The modern American composer Philip Glass will also find the story fascinating, and compose an opera, The Photographer, with a libretto based in part on court transcripts from the case.
Shortly after his acquittal in early 1875, Muybridge leaves the United States on a previously planned nine-month photography trip to Central America, as a "working exile".
Eadweard Muybridge has traveled for the past five years in Mexico and Central America, making publicity photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad, a company owned by his patron, the railroad magnate and former governor of California Leland Stanford.
A businessman and race-horse owner, Stanford had hired in 1872 Muybridge for some photographic studies.
He had taken a position on a popularly debated question of the day—whether all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time while trotting.
The same question had arisen about the actions of horses during a gallop.
The human eye could not break down the action at the quick gaits of the trot and gallop.
Up until this time, most artists painted horses at a trot with one foot always on the ground; and at a full gallop with the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear, and all feet off the ground.
Stanford, siding with the assertion of "unsupported transit" in the trot and gallop, had decided to have it proven scientifically.
Stanford had sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.
Muybridge had settled Stanford's question in the same year with a single photographic negative showing his Standardbred trotting horse Occident airborne at the trot.
(This negative was lost, but the image survives through woodcuts made at the time, the technology for printed reproductions of photographs still being developed).
In 1877, Muybridge returns to California and resumes his experiments in motion photography, using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gives an exposure of 21,000 of a second.
Eadweard Muybridge makes a famous thirteen-part 360° photographic panorama of San Francisco in 1878, to be presented to the wife of Leland Stanford. (It can be viewed today on the Internet as a panorama or as a QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) panorama.)