Eadweard Muybridge
(1830–)
(–1904)
Eadweard Muybridge
1830–1904
Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) was an English photographer important to the development of photography and cinema. He is most well-known for his studies in motion which brought together science and art in order to freeze time and discover elements of movement invisible to the human eye.
Born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames, England, Muggeridge changed his name to Eadweard Muybridge to reflect his Anglo-Saxon heritage. At the age of 20, he emigrated to the United States, and after a short period in New York City, he became a bookseller in San Francisco. In 1860, Muybridge became interested in the then-relatively new technology of photography. While travelling back east to purchase camera equipment, he was severely injured in a train accident. When he was well enough, he returned to England to recover and purchase camera equipment, staying there for seven years.
In 1867, Muybridge returned to the United States, and under the pseudonym Helios, he began a career as a landscape photographer in the Yosemite Valley. His life became focused on photography and between 1868 and 1873 he took over 2000 photographs. During this time, he became a well-established photographer and made many innovations in photography, such as inventing one of the first camera shutters. In 1872, Leland Stanford commissioned Muybridge to help prove that all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground while it is trotting. Using a shutter speed that had been sped up to open and close in a fraction of a second and a series of cameras set up in succession, Muybridge captured the proof in 1877. To illustrate his discovery, he invented a rapid projection machine, called a zoopraxiscope, that gave the illusion of a moving image by projecting a series of photos in quick succession. This technology became an important precedent for modern cinema.
Muybridge was offered a position at the University of Pennsylvania to continue his photographic studies of motion. Between 1884 and 1887, he conducted a number of image studies exploring the movement of human and animal bodies, creating over 100,000 images. Many of these images were published in the book Animal Locomotion, a text which became an important resource for both artists and scientists.
In 1900, Muybridge retired and moved back to the UK where he lived until his death in 1904.