Introduction
Eadweard Muybridge (; 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904, born Edward James Muggeridge) was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name. At age 20, he emigrated to America, first to New York, as a bookseller, and then to San Francisco. He returned to England in 1861, and took up professional photography, learning the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions. He went back to San Francisco in 1867, and in 1868 his large photographs of Yosemite Valley made him world-famous. Today, Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography. In 1874 he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover, but was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide. He travelled for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition in 1875. In the 1880s, Muybridge entered 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 could not distinguish as separate movements. He spent much of his later years giving public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences, travelling back to England and Europe to publicise his work. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. He returned to his native England permanently in 1894, and in 1904, the Kingston Museum, containing a collection of his equipment, was opened in his hometown.
Wikidata
Q190568
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Introduction
Eadweard Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge but he adopted the Saxon spelling of his name early in his life. Muybridge came to the United States in 1852 where he worked as a publisher and a book-dealer. He returned to England in 1860 and began photographing. By 1867 he returned to California and sold photographic views using the pseudonym "Helios." During this time, he was commissioned by Leland Stanford to study the motion of a trotting horse using photographic methods. Muybridge abandonded the experiments in 1873 while he travelled to Central America, but began them again when he returned in 1877. His experiments with capturing motion using photography became more in-depth as he designed a faster shutter and a technique for using shorter exposures. The resulting photographs allowed him to successfully analyze each individual stage of motion of a horse trotting, and the published photographs earned him a name with the public. He also performed additional experiments using multiple cameras to capture motion, and designed a projecting device for drawings derived from his photographs called a 'zoopraxiscope'. This device allowed him to illustrate how artists in the past had inaccurately represented motion in their paintings and drawings. In 1884, Muybridge began working at the University of Pennsylvania, where he continued his experiments using multiple cameras to study human and animal motion. Many of his photographs were reproduced in his landmark publication 'Animal Locomotion'. Today Muybridge's photographic innovations are considered a precursor to modern motion pictures. British photographer.
Nationalities
British, American, English, undetermined
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Photographer
Names
Eadweard Muybridge, Helios, Edward James Muggeridge, Muybridge Eadweard J., E. J. Muybridge, Eadweard J. Muybridge, Eduardo Santiago Muybridge
ULAN
500115207
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Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License