Dictionary Thesaurus Word Dynamo Quotes Reference Translator Spanish

Eadweard Muybridge

[mahy-brij]

Eadweard J. Muybridge (April 9, 1830 – May 8, 1904) was an English 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 the celluloid film strip that is still used today.

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 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 returned to England for a few years. He reappeared in San Francisco 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 (most notable the firm of Bradley & Rulofson), 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 Carleton 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 galloping question

In 1872, former Governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, had taken a position on a popularly-debated question of the day: whether all four of a horse's hooves left the ground at the same time during a gallop. 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. Muybridge's relationship with Stanford was long and fraught, heralding both 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 the chief engineer for the Southern Pacific Railroad, John D. Isaacs. It is important to underscore Muybridge's collaboration with John D. Isaacs. The design for the trigger to set off each camera was what eluded Muybridge for so long and without Isaacs' help, Muybridge's contraption would never have come into existence.

In 1877, Muybridge settled Stanford's question with a single photographic negative showing Stanford's racehorse Occident airborne in the midst of a gallop. This negative was lost, but it survives through woodcuts made at the time.

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 first experience successfully took place on June 11 with the press present. Muybridge used a series of 12 stereoscopic cameras, 21 inches apart to cover the 20 feet taken by one horse stride, taking pictures at one thousandth of a second. The cameras were arranged parallel to the track, with trip-wires attached to each camera shutter 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 do 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.

The relationship between the mercurial Muybridge and his patron broke down in 1882 when Stanford commissioned a book called The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography which omitted actual photographs by Muybridge, relying instead on drawings and engravings based on the photographs, and which gave Muybridge scant credit for his work.

The lack of photographs was likely simply due to the printing constraints of the time but Muybridge took it as a slap in the face and filed an unsuccessful law suit against Stanford.

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"; he then killed the Major with a gunshot.

Muybridge believed Larkyns to be his son's true father, although as an adult, the son bore a remarkable resemblance to Muybridge. Muybridge was put on trial for murder, but was acquitted as a "justifiable homicide." The inquiry interrupted his horse photography experiment, but not his relationship with Stanford, who paid for his criminal defense.

An interesting aspect of Muybridge's defense was a plea of insanity due to a head injury Muybridge sustained following his stagecoach accident. Friends testified that the accident dramatically changed Muybridge's personality from genial and pleasant to unstable and erratic. Although the jury dismissed the insanity plea, it is not unlikely that Muybridge had experienced emotional changes due to brain damage in the frontal cortex, often associated with traumatic head injuries. {For a description of Muybridge's suggested neurological injury, see Shimamura, 2002.)

After the acquittal, Muybridge left the United States for a time to take photographs in Central America, returning in 1877. He had his son, Florado Helios Muybridge (nicknamed "Floddie" by friends), put in an orphanage. As an adult, Floddie worked as a ranch hand and gardener. In 1944 he was hit by a car in Sacramento and did not survive his injuries.

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

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 film. His presentations, in Europe and the United States, were widely acclaimed by both the public and specialist audiences of scientists and artists.

At the Chicago 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, Muybridge gave a series of lectures on the Science of Animal Locomotion in the Zoopraxographical Hall, built specially for that purpose in the "Midway Plaisance" arm of the exposition. He used his zoopraxiscope to show his moving pictures to a paying public making the Hall, the very first commercial movie theater.

At the University of Pennsylvania and the local zoo Muybridge used banks of cameras to photograph people and animals to study their movement. The models, either entirely nude or with very little clothing, were photographed in a variety of undertakings, ranging from boxing, to walking down stairs, to throwing water over one another and carrying buckets of water. Between 1883 and 1886 he made a total of 100,000 images, working under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. They were published as 781 plates comprising 20,000 of the photographs in a collection titled Animal Locomotion. Muybridge's work stands near the beginning of the science of biomechanics and the mechanics of athletics.

Recent scholarship has pointed to the influence of Étienne Jules de Marey on Muybridge's later work. Muybridge visited Marey's studio in France and saw Marey's stop-motion studies 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 and aerodynamics (as well as pioneering work in photography and chronophotography) are indisputable, Muybridge's efforts were to some degree artistic rather than scientific. As Muybridge himself explained, in some of his published sequences he substituted images where exposures failed, in order to illustrate a representative movement (rather than producing a strictly scientific recording of a particular sequence).

Similar setups of carefully timed multiple cameras are used in modern special effects photography with the opposite goal of capturing changing camera angles with little or no movement of the subject. This is often dubbed "bullet time" photography.

Death

Eadweard Muybridge returned to his native England in 1894, published two further, popular books of his work, and died on May 8, 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.

Legacy

Several of his photographic sequences were published in 1980 as coffee-table books under the title Studies of Animal Locomotion. 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.

A documentary of his life and work, titled Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer was made by filmmaker Thom Andersen, in 1974.

Composer Philip Glass's 1982 opera The Photographer is based on Muybridge's murder trial, the libretto including text from the transcript. A promotional music video of an excerpt of the opera dramatized the murder and trial and included a considerable number of Muybridge images.

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

A collection of his equipment can be viewed at the Kingston Museum in Kingston upon Thames.

Influenced:

John Gaeta - The basic principles of Muybridge's photography were redirected to create the "bullet time" slow-motion film technique seen in the popular 1999 motion picture 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