| Names: | Born: Edward James Muggeridge
Other: E.J. Muybridge
Other: Eadweard J. Muybridge
Other: Edward Muybridge
Pen: Helios
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| | Dates: | 1830, 9 April - 1904, 8 May | | Born: | Great Britain, England, Kingston-on-Thames | | Active: | US |
Worked in America for 40 years, photographing the Pacific Railway, Yosemite, Panama & Guatemala (1875) 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.
Stereographs project
Business locations
San Francisco, CA, US
[6-7] *[Eadweard James Muybridge, originally
Edward Muggeridge] "Photographer"; "Cosmopolitan
Gallery of Photographic Art" & "The Flying
Studio"; "Photographic Illustrations of the
Pacific Coast", AK, CA, NV, UT, OR, etc., pub.
by Bradley & Rulofson, often used imprint of
"Helios". Produced fine and extensive groups of
west coast views. Was backed by Leland Stanford
to try photographing animals & people in motion,
later worked in PA on same technique. B. 30 in
England; to America in 51; D. 04. SEE Eadweard
Muybridge: The Stanford Years; R.B. Haas:
Muybridge, Man in Motion; Animals in Motion: An
Electro-Photographic Investigation of Animal
Progressive Movements.
T.K. Treadwell & William C. Darrah (Compiled by), Wolfgang, Sell (Updated by), 11/28/2003, Photographers of the United States of America, (National Stereoscopic Association) |
| Credit: National Stereoscopic Association with corrections and additions by Alan Griffiths and others. |
| NOTE: You are probably here because you have a stereograph to identify. Please email good quality copies of the front and back to alan@luminous-lint.com so we can create reference collections for all. |
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.
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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
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