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Eadweard Muybridge was born in 1830 in England as Edward Muggeridge but changed his name to Eadweard Muybridge before traveling to San Francisco around 1852. After a brief return to England for health reasons, Eadweard Muybridge began working with Carleton Watkins in California. In the mid-1860s, he ventured to Yosemite Valley and made a series of photographs and stereoscopic slides which met favorable reviews. His technical achievement earned him enough attention to be appointed the Director of Photographic Surveys for the United States government, a job that sent him to unmapped western territories of Montana, Wyoming and the recent acquisition of Alaska.
Eadweard Muybridge is best known for his action pictures of human and animal locomotion. Supposedly prompted by a wager concerning a horse's gait made by ex-California governor Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge made a study of a galloping horse in 1872 with fair results. Over the next five years Eadweard Muybridge traveled and photographed throughout Central America, finally returning to the U.S. and to the study of human and animal locomotion in 1877. His continuing work with models in motion eventually led to his invention of the "zoopraxiscope," a moving picture machine that showed a rapid succession of images. Throughout the 1880s, Eadweard Muybridge lectured and made thousands of locomotion studies. With the help of Thomas Eakins, he worked at the University of Pennsylvania where he continued to refine his technique and eventually published Animal Locomotion. Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies are considered to be a critical step in the evolution of photography to motion pictures. By 1900, Eadweard Muybridgeretired to his hometown in England where he died in 1904.
For more information, see Kevin MacDonnell's Eadweard Muybridge: The Man Who Invented the Moving Picture, Little, Brown & Company, 1972.
Bibliography:
- Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1976.
- David Harris, Eric Sandweiss, Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880, Montreal: Centre Canadien d Architecture, 1993.
- Kevin MacDonnell, Eadweard Muybridge: The Man Who Invented the Moving Picture, Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1972.
- Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of Motion Picture, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975.
- Eadweard Muybridge, Muybridge's Complete Human and Animal Locomotion, Volume 3, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1979.
- Eadweard Muybridge, Muybridge's Complete Human and Animal Locomotion, Volume 2, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1979.
- Eadweard Muybridge, Muybridge's Complete Human and Animal Locomotion, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1979.
- Eadweard J. Muybridge, E. Bradford Burns, Eadweard Muybridge in Guatamal, 1875: The Photographer as a Social Recorder, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1986.
- James L. Sheldon, Jock Reynolds, Motion and Document Sequence and Time: Eadweard Muybridge and Contemporary American Photography, Andover, MA: Addison Gallery, 1991.
- Smithsonian Art Museum, Eadweard Muybridge the Central American Journey, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Art Museum, Feb-April 2007.
- Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003.
Member of The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD)
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