Eadweard Muybridge, a brilliant and eccentric photographer, gained worldwide fame photographing animal and human movement imperceptible to the human eye.
Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames in 1830. He changed his name as an adult to sound more archaic – Eadweard being an Anglo-Saxon form of Edward. At the age of 20, Muybridge emigrated to the United States to work as a bookseller, developing his photography skills shortly after his move whilst recuperating from a Stagecoach crash. The accident fundamentally altered Muybridge’s personality and, on the 17th October 1874, he shot and killed his wife’s lover, Harry Larkyns, at point-blank range after it was suggested that Larkyns might be the father of Muybridge’s son. Despite his lawyer’s plea of insanity on Muybridge’s behalf, Eadweard insisted that his actions had been deliberate and premeditated. However, he was surprisingly acquitted of murder on the grounds of justifiable homicide, as members of the jury felt that they would have acted in the same way in the same circumstances! Unsurprisingly, Muybridge’s wife was subsequently granted a divorce.
Following the case, Eadweard Muybridge continued to pursue his photography work. In 1872, the former Governor of California, Leland Stanford, asked Muybridge to photograph his horse, Occident, trotting at speed. The aim was to determine through photography whether in its trot the horse would have all four hooves off the ground at the same time. Muybridge’s first photographs were inconclusive.
Undeterred, he designed an improved shutter to work at the astonishing speed of one-thousandth of a second and used his photographic experience to sensitise his plates for the shortest possible exposure. When the resulting picture of Occident in arrested motion was published in July 1877 it created a minor sensation. He then set up a battery of 12 cameras fitted with electromagnetic shutters which were activated by strings stretched across the track. Later he expanded this to 24 cameras, allowing him to capture animals’ movement in a way that had never been done before, and his photographs were widely reproduced in publications throughout America and Europe.
In the 1880s the University of Pennsylvania sponsored Muybridge’s research using banks of cameras to photograph people in a studio, and animals from the Philadelphia Zoo, to study their movement. The human models, either entirely nude or very lightly clothed, were photographed against a measured grid background in a variety of action sequences, including walking up or down stairs, hammering on an anvil, carrying buckets of water, or throwing water over one another, eventually producing thousands of images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. In 1887, the photographs were published in 11 volumes, with 781 plates as Animal Locomotion: an Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements.
Muybridge thought of himself primarily as an artist but also saw the scientific and commercial aspects of his inventions. He spent much of his later years giving public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences, inventing the “zoopraxiscope” - a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography. This device was later regarded as an early movie projector, and the process as an intermediate stage toward motion pictures or cinematography. Eadweard Muybridge died on the 8th May 1904, having returned to England and his hometown.
