| Names: | Born: Edward James Muggeridge
Other: Eadweard J. Muybridge
Pen: Helios
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| | Dates: | 1830, 9 April - 1904, 8 May | | Born: | Great Britain, England, Kingston-on-Thames | | Active: | US | | Gender: | Male |
Worked in America for 40 years, photographing the Pacific Railway, Yosemite, Panama & Guatemala as well as a terrific series of panoramas of San Francisco. Series of photographs of galloping horse to show that, at any one time, all four legs were off the ground, led to further work in photographing movement, anticipating film.
[Contributed by Pam Roberts]
Some of his negatives were printed by Wyland Stanley in the 1950s.Preparing biographies
Eadweard Muybridge is most famous for his split-second studies of motion which began in 1872 with an attempt to capture the movement of a galloping horse. By 1877 he had developed a technique to place 12 cameras in a row to capture each stage of the horse’s movement. His books Animal Locomotion and The Human Figure in Motion made systematic studies of movement, and inspired artists in the twentieth century such as Francis Bacon. Later Muybridge experimented with a device to create moving images from still photographs, making him a pioneer of cinematography.
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 11 Nov 2011.
SHARED BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION PROJECT
We welcome institutions and scholars willing to test the sharing of biographies for the benefit of the photo-history community. The biography above is a part of this trial.
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General reading
Keller, Corey, 2008, Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900
Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/audio/btl_tour#ixzz1sFKqzaUs
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (Yale University Press) isbn-10: 0300142102 isbn-13: 978-0300142105 [Δ]
Readings on, or by, individual photographers
Burns, E Bradford, 1986, Eadweard Muybridge in Guatemala, 1875: The Photographer as Social Recorder, (Berkeley: University of California Press) [Δ]
Haas, Robert Bartlett, 1976, Muybridge: Man in Motion, (Berkeley: University of California Press) [Δ]
Harris, David, 1993, Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880, (Canadian Center for Architecture/Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) [Δ]
Muñoz, Luis Luján, 1975, Guatemala - 1875. Fotografías de Eadweard Muybridge, (Guatamala, CENALTEX, Ministerio de Educación) [Exhibition catalogue] [Δ]
Muñoz, Luis Luján, 1984, Fotografías de Eduardo Santiago Muybridge en Guatemala (1875), (Guatamala, CENALTEX, Ministerio de Educación) [Δ]
Muybridge, Eadweard, 1972, Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872–1882, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Museum of Art) [Introduction by Anita Ventura Mozley.] [Δ]
Muybridge, Eadweard, 1979, Muybridge's Complete Human and Animal Locomotion, (New York: Dover) [Introduction by Anita Ventura Mosley] [Δ]
Muybridge, Eadweard, 1979, Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion, (New York: Dover Publications) [3 Vols., Intro. by Anita Ventura Mozley] [Δ]
If you feel this list is missing a significant book or article please let me know - Alan - alan@luminous-lint.com | |
Family history
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Exhibitions on this website |
 | Eadweard Muybridge: Animal Locomotion |
|  | Eadweard Muybridge: Experimental establishments |
|  | Eadweard Muybridge: Horses in Motion |
|  | Eadweard Muybridge: The Modoc War |
|  | Eadweard Muybridge: The Zoopraxiscope |
|  | Eadweard Muybridge: USA: CA: Yosemite |
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All photographs by this photographer
Eadweard Muybridge
English, 1830-1904
The photographer 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, 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.
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, Muybridge made a study of a galloping horse in 1872 with fair results. Over the next five years 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 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. Muybridge's motion studies are considered to be a critical step in the evolution of photography to motion pictures. By 1900 Muybridge retired 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.
[Contributed by Lee Gallery]
The following books are useful starting points to obtain brief biographies but they are not substitutes for the monographs on individual photographers. |
• Beaton, Cecil & Buckland, Gail 1975 The Magic Eye: The Genius of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown & Company) p.76 [Useful short biographies with personal asides and one or more example images.]
• Capa, Cornell (ed.) 1984 The International Center of Photography: Encyclopedia of Photography (New York, Crown Publishers, Inc. - A Pound Press Book) p.350-351
• Lenman, Robin (ed.) 2005 The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press) [Includes a short biography on Eadweard Muybridge.]
• Witkin, Lee D. and Barbara London 1979 The Photograph Collector’s Guide (London: Secker and Warburg) p.198-199 [Long out of print but an essential reference work - the good news is that a new edition is in preparation.]
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Library of Congress, Washington, USA
Approximate number of records: 63 records
Note: A single record may contain more than one photograph. | Click here |
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