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'Eadweard Muybridge' (April 9, 1830 – May 8, 1904) was an English-born photographer, known primarily for his early use of multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated celluloid film strip still used today.

Contents

Early life and career

Photographing the West

Stanford and the trot question

Murder acquittal

Zoopraxiscope entertainer

Influences

References

Sources

External links

Early life and career

Muybridge was born 'Edward James Muggeridge' at Kingston upon Thames, England. He is believed to have changed his first name to match that of King Eadweard as shown on the plinth of the Kingston coronation stone, which was re-erected in Kingston in 1850. Although he didn't change his first name until the 1870s, he changed his surname to Muygridge early in his San Francisco career and then changed it again to Muybridge at the launch of his photographic career or during the missing years between.
In 1855 Muybridge arrived in San Francisco, starting his career as a publisher's agent and bookseller. He left San Francisco at the end of that decade, and after a stagecoach accident in which he received severe head injuries disappeared for a few years. He reappeared in 1866 as a photographer named Muybridge and rapidly became successful in the profession, focusing almost entirely on landscape and architectural subjects. (He is not known to have ever made a photographic portrait, though group shots by him survive.) His photographs were sold by various photographic entrepreneurs on Montgomery Street, San Francisco's main commercial street, during those years.

Photographing the West

Muybridge began to build his reputation in 1867 with photos of Yosemite and San Francisco (many of the Yosemite photographs reproduced the same scenes taken by Watkins). Muybridge quickly became famous for his landscape photographs, which showed the grandeur and expansiveness of the West. The images were published under the pseudonym “Helios.” In the summer of 1868 Muybridge was commissioned to photograph one of the U.S. Army's expeditions into the recently territorialized Alaska purchase.

In 1871 the California Geological Survey invited Muybridge to photograph for the High Sierra survey. That same year he married Flora Stone. He then spent several years traveling as a successful photographer. By 1873 the Central Pacific Railroad had advanced into Indian territory and the United States Army hired Muybridge to photograph the ensuing Modoc Wars.

Stanford and the trot question

In 1872, soon-to-be Governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, had taken a position on a popularly-debated question of the day: whether during a horse's trot, all four hooves were ever off the ground at the same time. Stanford sided with this assertion, called "unsupported transit", and took it upon himself to prove it scientifically. (Though legend also includes a wager of up to $25,000, there is no evidence of this.) Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.^[1] Muybridge's relationship with Stanford was long and torrid, and it would ultimately prove to be his entrance and exit from the history books.
To prove Stanford's claim, Muybridge developed a scheme for instantaneous motion picture capture. Muybridge's technology involved chemical formulas for photographic processing and an electrical trigger created by Stanford's electrical engineer, John D. Isaacs.

In 1877, Muybridge settled Stanford's question with a single photographic negative showing Stanford's racehorse ''Occident'' airborne during trot. This negative has not survived, although woodcuts made of it did.
By 1878, spurred on by Stanford to expand the experiment, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion using a series of twenty-four cameras. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse's, and each of the camera shutters was controlled by a trip wire which was triggered by the horse's hooves.
This series of photos, taken at what is now Stanford University, is called ''The Horse in Motion'', and shows that the hooves all leave the ground — although not with the legs fully extended forward and back, as contemporary illustrators tended to imagine, but rather at the moment when all the hooves are tucked ''under'' the horse, as it switches from "pulling" from the front legs to "pushing" from the back legs.

Murder acquittal

In 1874, still living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Muybridge discovered that his wife had a lover, a Major Harry Larkyns. On October 17, 1874, he sought out Larkyns; said, "Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here is the answer to the letter you sent my wife"; and shot and killed him.^[2]
Muybridge thought his wife's son had been fathered by Larkyns (although, as an adult, the young man had a remarkable resemblance to Muybridge). He was put on trial for the killing, but acquitted of the killing on the grounds that it was "justifiable homicide." The inquiry interrupted the horse photography experiment, but not Stanford's support of Muybridge; Stanford paid for his criminal defense.
After the acquittal, Muybridge left the U.S. for a time and photographed in Central America, returning in 1877. The son, Florado Helios Muybridge (nicknamed "Floddie" by friends) was placed in an orphanage, and worked as a ranch hand and gardener as an adult. He died after being hit by a car at age 69 in 1944.
This episode in Muybridge's life is the subject of ''The Photographer'', a 1982 opera by Philip Glass, with words drawn from the trial and Muybridge's letters to his wife.

Zoopraxiscope entertainer

He then conducted research in order to improve the chemistry of his development methods to better capture motion in his photography. Hoping to capitalize upon the considerable public attention those pictures drew, Muybridge invented the Zoopraxiscope, a machine similar to the Zoetrope, but that projected the images so the public could see realistic motion. The system was, in many ways, a precursor to the development of the motion picture.
Muybridge also authored disks for the phenakistoscope, a parlor toy used to view short motion sequences.
Muybridge used this technique many times to photograph people and animals to study their movement. The people were often photographed in little or no clothing in a variety of undertakings. From boxing, to walking down stairs, and even small children walking to their mother were sufficiently interesting to Muybridge to be the subject of his photographs. In any case, Muybridge's work stands near the beginning of the science of biomechanics and the mechanics of athletics.

Recent scholarship has pointed to the immense influence of Étienne Jules de Marey on Muybridge's work. Muybridge visited de Marey's studio in France and saw Marey's stop-motion studies of animals before returning to the U.S. to further his own work in the same area. However, whereas Marey's scientific achievements in the realms of cardiology, aviation, and aerodynamics (as well as pioneering work in photography and cinema) are indisputable, Muybridge's efforts were distinctly unscientific. In many cases close inspection of his stop motion studies reveal that he has 'cheated', by using either the same images over again or by combining separate sequences to exaggerate effects. Also, his creation of images of nude women in all manner of poses seems rooted in prurient rather than scientific impulses.
Similar setups of carefully timed multiple cameras are used in modern special effects photography with the opposite goal: capturing changing camera angles with little or no movement of the subject.
Eadweard Muybridge returned to his native England in 1894 and died in 1904 in Kingston upon Thames while living at the home of his cousin Catherine Smith, Park View, 2 Liverpool Road. The house has a British Film Institute commemorative plaque on the outside wall. Muybridge was cremated and his ashes interred at Woking.

Influences

In 1985 the music video for Larry Gowan's single "(You're A) Strange Animal" prominently featured animation rotoscoped from Muybridge's work. In 1986 in the John Farnham music video for the song Pressure Down the galloping horse sequence is used in the background. In 1993, U2 made a video to their song "Lemon" into a tribute to Muybridge's techniques. In 2004, the electronic music group The Crystal Method made a music video to their song "Born Too Slow" which was based on Muybridge's work, including a man walking in front of a background grid.
In the summer of 2004, during the Summer Olympic Games which were held in Greece, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts housed an exhibition highlighting ancient Greece and included 2 of Muybridge's photograph plates hanging next to more modern representations of athletes as part of the exhibit.

Kingston University, London, UK has a building named in recognition of his work as one of Britains most influential photographers.
Influenced:

★ John Gaeta - The basic principles of Muybridge's photography were redirected to create the "bullet-time" slow-motion film technique seen in The Matrix.

★ Étienne-Jules Marey - recorded first series of live action with a single camera

★ Thomas Eakins - an artist who worked with and continued Muybridge's motion studies and incorporated the findings into his own artwork

★ Thomas Edison - owns patent for motion picture camera

★ William Dickson - credited as inventor of motion picture camera

★ Marcel Duchamp - see Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

★ Animators and artists still use Muybridge's work as a reference

References

Sources

★ Rebecca Solnit. ''River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West'', 2003 ISBN 0-670-03176-3.

External links

★ 3D computer graphic version of "The Horse In Motion" study using motion capture technology

★ Tesseract 20 Min experimental film telling the story of Eadweard Muybridge's obsession with time and its image at the turn of the century.

★ Animation made of the first moving pictures in film history by Carola Unterberger-Probst

★ Burns, Paul. The History of the Discovery of Cinematography An Illustrated Chronology

★ 1872, Yosemite American Indian Life Muybridge was one of the most prolific photographers of early Yosemite American Indian life.

★ Selected items from the Eadweard Muybridge Collection, University Archives and Record Center, University of Pennsylvania

★ Link to The Muybridge Collection at Kingston Museum, Kingston Upon Thames, Surrey.

★ The University of South Florida Tampa Library's Special Collections Department retains copies of Muybridge's 11-volume ''Animal Locomotion Studies'' and similar publications by E.-J. Marey

★ Website for the Film: ''Freezing Time'' on the life of Muybridge directed by Andy Serkis and written by Keith Stern.

★ Extensive Chronology, Comparative Timeline, and 'Muy Blog'.