Muybridge, Eadweard

Muybridge, Eadweard (ed'wurd mī'brij) [key], 1830–1904, English-born photographer and student of animal locomotion. Muybridge changed his name from Edward James Muggeridge. A gifted and obsessed eccentric, he was a photographic innovator who left a vast and enormously varied body of work. He immigrated to the United States in the early 1850s and settled in San Francisco. In 1872 he made some experiments in photographing moving objects for the U.S. government. Afterward he was engaged by Leland Stanford to record the movements of a horse with a series of sequential still cameras triggered by threads. He invented (1881) the zoöpraxiscope, which projected animated pictures on a screen, a forerunner of the motion picture. He wrote The Horse in Motion (1878) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901). His Animals in Motion (1899, repr. 1957) consists of 11 portfolios: thousands of pictures of men, women, children, amputees, and many domestic and wild animals in action. This work was of considerable importance to artists. He also made outstanding landscape studies in Central America and Yosemite and panoramic views of San Francisco. Muybridge murdered his wife's lover in 1874; the case was dismissed as justifiable homicide.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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