established himself as
a leading photographer by producing a spectacular series of views of the Yosemite
Valley. The government recognized his abilities; in 1868 he accompanied an
expedition to examine the newly acquired Alaskan territories. He also produced
views of the lighthouses on the Pacific Coast for the United States Lighthouse
Board.
Leland Stanford former
governor of California and the president of the Central Pacific Railroad,
took note of the photographer in 1872 and decided that he was the man to help
him find the solution to a vexing problem. Stanford bred horses and raced
trotters. He held (correctly, but without proof) that, at some point during
a fast trot, a horse will have all four legs off the ground simultaneously.
Stanford turned to Muybridge to provide photographic evidence to support his
supposition. Muybridge was intrigues by the challenge (for up to that time
no photographs had been taken at the speed necessary to capture such action)
and was beginning to develop a method for approaching the problem when a personal
tragedy almost ended his career.
In 1874 Muybridge discovered
that the son borne him by his younger wife was, in fact not his. Having determined
that the father was one Harry Larkyns, he sought the man out and shot him
to death. Muybridge came close to being lynched. At his trial in 1875, a plea
of insanity was entered but the jury ignored it, choosing instead to acquit
Muybridge on the ground that Larkyns had deserved his fate.
Soon after the trial,
Muybridge spent six months photographing various sites in Panama and Guatemala.
Returning to San Francisco, he made a successful panorama of the city and
environs and then, once again, directed his attention to the movement of the
horse. Resuming his collaboration with Stanford, he developed chemical and
mechanical techniques to capture motion in sequences. The publication of his
results allowed people, for the first time, to see clearly attitudes taken
by horses in motion.
Muybridge found that
public curiosity was sufficient to warrant lectures on his experiments. To
illustrate the he developed the zoopraxiscope, which, using the principle
of the zoetrope, allowed him to project images creating the appearance of
motion. On the basis of this invention, many people credit Muybridge as the
inventor of the motion picture.
In August 1881 Mybridge
went to Europe, where he was greeted with enthusiasm. On November 26 the painter
Ernest Meissonier held a glittering reception for him in Paris. Initially,
Muybridge met with similar acclaim when he went to England, Counting among
his audiences Gladstone, Tennyson, Huxley and the Prince and Princess of Wales.
On his return to the
United States in 1882, Muybridge continued to lecture, but also turned his
attention toward organizing a project to further his investigations into locomotion
by photographing men, women, children and animals, using a setup much like
the one he had developed with Stanford. Unable to finance the project himself,
he finally arranged for it to be done under the auspices of the University
of Pennsylvania. In return for the facilities provided, Muybridge agreed to
work under the supervision of members of the university representing the worlds
of science and art, including the great painter Thomas Eakins.
Work began in 1884; the
last series that was included in the final work was photographed on October
28, 1885. The university published Animal Locomotion; an electro-photographic
investigation of consecutive phases of animal movements in eleven volumes
in 1887. Subscribers paying $100 were entitled to order 100 plates from the
total of 781. To drum up business, Muybridge continued his lecture tours in
the United States and Europe. In the end close to 450 copies were sold.
After running an exhibition
of the zoopraxiscope on the Midway of the World's Columbian Exposition of
1893, Muybridge returned to England permanently. He died in Kingston-upon-Thames
in 1904.
Muybridge's Methods
in brief: In an open shed about 120 feet long a background, against which
the models moved, was marked off by threads into squares of 5 cm (approximately
2 inches). These aided in following the movements and facilitated use by artists.
Parallel to the shed was a fixed battery of 24 cameras. Two portable batteries
of 12 cameras each were positioned at both ends of the shed, either at an
angle of 90û relative to the shed or at an angle of 60û. The equipment (and
the use of newly available gelatin dry plates) allowed three photographs to
be taken simultaneously, one from each battery. The photographs reproduced
the plates (frequently featuring views from all three vantage points) are
numbered in chronological order, going from left to right if such was the
principal direction of the action being recorded; right to left if the motion
occurred in that direction. When several separate sequences are recorded on
a plate, they are differentiated by letter.
Excerpts from:
The Male and Female Figure in Motion, 60 classic photographic sequences, Eadweard
Muybridge, Dover Publications, Inc. New York, 1984.
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