Eadweard Muybridge
1830-1904
In his early twenties, Eadweard Muybridge moved to the United States, where he was drawn to the primarily uncharted Western landscape. After a stagecoach accident, he convalesced back home in England and learned photography. Upon returning to the States in 1867, he soon earned his reputation photographing the landscape. Apparently a hot-tempered man, Muybridge shot and killed his much younger wife's lover but was acquitted after a sensational trial, in part perhaps because he was friends with Leland Stanford, railroad magnate and governor of California. They became acquainted in 1872, when Stanford made a bet regarding a horse's gallop, contending that when a horse gallops, at some point all four of its feet are off the ground simultaneously. Stanford hired Muybridge to prove it photographically; Muybridge, using a system of trip-shutter, high-speed photography and twenty-four cameras, did just that. Never one for false modesty, Muybridge declared: Muybridge is best known for this work and his "Animal Locomotion" series of stopped-action motion studies completed in 1887.
Films