`Marta Braun's Eadweard Muybridge will be a fundamental contribution to the history of the photographic representation of locomotion.'---Jonathan Miller`Offers a new perspective on Muybridge's life and work and corrects misinterpretations of his locomotion photography. A valuable, first-rate work that's a pleasure to read.'---Ed Burtynsky, PhotographerBest known for his unique contribution to the development of motion pictures, Eadweard Muybridge was a pioneering British photographer whose career was made in America. Enlisted by a railroad baron who bred racehorses to solve the `unsupported motion controversy' (the theory that during a horse's stride, there is a moment when all four legs are off the ground). Muybridge's successes in sequence photography made him famous worldwide. He went on to invent the zoopraxiscope, an ingenious magic lantern showing simulated movement, while his years of electro-photographic experiments on motion studies of animals and humans resulted in Animal Locomotion, an astonishing scientific atlas of movement comprising hundreds of plates.Marta Braun's expert study of a true innovator and driven entrepreneur also examines the melodramatic and other personal events that punctuated Muybridge's reinventions as artist, photographer, scientific researcher and showman lecturer. They include a near-fatal stagecoach accident that left him mentally scarred for life, and a trial for murder. This book is a rewarding account of an extraordinary life that began in earnest in the Wild West of the Gold Rush era.
Best known for his contribution to the development of the motion picture, Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) was a pioneering photographer during his lifetime. Alongside his remarkable photographic achievements, his personal life was riddled with melodrama—including a near-fatal stagecoach accident and a betrayal by his wife that ended with Muybridge being tried for the murder of her lover. Marta Braun’s revealing biography traces the sensational events of Muybridge’s life and his personal reinventions as artist, photographer, researcher, and showman. In the 1870s, Muybridge’s photography skills were enlisted by Leland Stanford, a racehorse breeder who later founded Stanford University, to prove the “unsupported motion controversy”—the theory that during a horse’s stride, there was a moment when all four of its legs left the ground. The resulting collection of motion studies, as Braun explains, inspired Muybridge to take photography beyond landscapes to the realm of science. He went on to invent the zoopraxiscope, which captures movement too quick for the human eye to record. Most importantly, simulating motion through a series of stills, his pioneering use of sequence photography served as a forerunner to the introduction of cinematography in the 1890s. This illuminating study examines a man whose influence has resounded through generations. In Eadweard Muybridge, Braun firmly establishes Muybridge’s central contributions to the history of art, science, photography, and motion pictures.