Eadweard Muybridge (1830 to 1904) was an English photographer who did most of his work in the United States. In the late 1860s and 1870s he photographed Yosemite, Alaska and San Francisco. He is known for what came next: in 1878, at Leland Stanford’s farm in Palo Alto, California, he used a row of cameras to split a running horse’s stride into separate photographs, and he spent the following decade photographing people and animals in motion.
Muybridge came to photography late, after years as a bookseller. In his San Francisco shop he had sold landscape photographs by Carleton Watkins, and when he took up the camera he went to the same valley, Yosemite. One comparison of the two calls Watkins the classicist and Muybridge the romantic, drawn to the uncanny and the unsettling. He may have learned the wet plate process in England in the 1860s, at a time when Julia Margaret Cameron and Roger Fenton were at work there, though how much they influenced him is not certain. In 1881 he visited the studio of Étienne-Jules Marey in France, where movement was also being studied with the camera.
A bookseller, a stagecoach crash and a new name
He was born Edward James Muggeridge on 9 April 1830 in Kingston upon Thames, England. At twenty he emigrated to the United States. He worked in the book trade in New York, reached California around 1855, and set up as a bookseller and print seller in San Francisco. He changed the spelling of his surname more than once, settling on Muybridge from 1865. The first name Eadweard came later, after 1882.
In 1860 he sold his stock to his brother and set off east by stagecoach. In July the coach crashed in Texas. He was thrown out and suffered a serious head injury. He went back to England to recover, and he later said that his doctor suggested photography as a profession. He returned to San Francisco in February 1867 as a photographer.
Helios and the western landscape
He signed his early work Helios and turned a light carriage into a travelling darkroom that he called Helios’ Flying Studio. From June to November 1867 he photographed in Yosemite with a heavy view camera and glass plate negatives, bringing back stereoscopic views and larger plates. Twenty of the photographs illustrated an 1868 guide book, Yosemite: Its Wonders and Its Beauties. The pictures stress grandeur, and human figures are dwarfed by what surrounds them. They belong to the early history of landscape photography in the American West.
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Government work followed. In 1868 he photographed Alaska, newly acquired by the United States. In 1871 he documented West Coast lighthouses for the Lighthouse Board. In 1873 he photographed the Modoc War for the Army. He published more than 400 stereograph cards in these years. From 1870 to 1872 he also recorded the construction of the San Francisco Mint step by step, an early relative of time-lapse photography. In 1878 he completed a 360 degree view of San Francisco in thirteen parts.
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His private life interrupted the work. In October 1874 he shot and killed Harry Larkyns, with whom his wife Flora had been involved. He was tried for murder in February 1875. His lawyer argued insanity resulting from the 1860 head injury, but the jury acquitted him on the ground of justifiable homicide. He then spent some months photographing in Central America.
Stanford’s horses and the Philadelphia studio
In 1872 Leland Stanford, a former governor of California and an owner of racehorses, hired Muybridge. Stanford wanted a true picture of a horse at full speed, something the eye could not make out. A first attempt in 1873, with one camera, gave a small and fuzzy result. The breakthrough came in June 1878 at Stanford’s Palo Alto farm. Muybridge set twelve cameras in a row beside the track. As the horse passed, it tripped wires that fired each shutter in turn through an electrical circuit. The results were published as cabinet cards under the title The Horse in Motion. In 1879 he repeated the work with twenty four cameras.
The pictures showed that a running horse does lift all four hooves off the ground at once. It happens when the legs are gathered under the body, not when they are stretched out front and back as painters had drawn them.
In 1879 he devised a projector, later named the zoopraxiscope, to show the sequences in motion during his lectures. Images were painted as silhouettes on glass disks, and a hand crank turned the disk past a slotted shutter. In 1893 he lectured with it in a purpose built Zoopraxographical Hall at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
He and Stanford fell out after a book on the research, published in 1882, gave Muybridge no prominent credit. He moved his work to Philadelphia, where the University of Pennsylvania sponsored a much larger study. Its results were published in 1887 as Animal Locomotion: 781 plates holding more than 20,000 photographs. He retired to England in 1894, published Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901), and died in Kingston upon Thames on 8 May 1904. He left his collection to Kingston Museum.
How the motion studies were built
The method rests on four decisions, and each one still applies to anyone trying to photograph a moving subject.
- A very short exposure. The 1878 shutters were said to open for about a thousandth of a second. That is the same idea as choosing a fast shutter speed to freeze action, achieved with purpose built electrical shutters.
- Many cameras, one after another. A single camera could take one picture of the stride. A row of them, fired in order, took the whole stride apart. In Philadelphia the main array was twenty four cameras taking 4×5 inch pictures, set six inches apart, with two further sets of twelve that could be placed in front of and behind the subject.
- A measured background. At Palo Alto the horse ran past white planks marked with vertical lines 21 inches apart. In Philadelphia the models moved in front of a grid. The background turned each frame into a measurement as well as a picture.
- Good light and faster plates. Most of the Philadelphia work was done in a sunlit outdoor studio, because the cameras were bulky and the plates slow. A standardised dry plate process there allowed quicker exposures.
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The last step was the layout. The frames were printed together on one sheet, in order. A viewer sees time as a series of positions. This is sequencing in its most literal form. It was also edited. Historians note that Muybridge cropped images, left out parts of a sequence and sometimes combined frames from different takes, so the plates are composed pictures as well as records.
Photographs to look for
- Yosemite views (1867). Stereographs and larger plates from the year he returned to California as a photographer. Look for the small human figures set against the valley, which is how he conveyed its size.
- Panorama of San Francisco (1878). Thirteen parts making a full 360 degree circle of the city. It is worth studying as a planned set of overlapping views, made in the same year as the horse pictures.
- The Horse in Motion (1878). The cabinet cards from Palo Alto, each with six to twelve frames of one horse. The best known shows Sallie Gardner running on 19 June 1878. Find the frames where no hoof touches the ground and note where the legs are.
- Animal Locomotion (1887). The 781 plates from Philadelphia: professors, students, athletes, hospital patients, local residents, and animals from the Philadelphia Zoo, against a grid. Many human models were photographed nude or lightly clothed.
- Zoopraxiscope disks (from 1879). Painted glass disks made for projection. The figures were drawn elongated on purpose, to cancel the distortion the projector produced.
- The Human Figure in Motion (1901). One of two popular later books drawn from the motion studies. Both stayed in print for more than a century and are still used by artists, animators and students of movement.
Try this: take one movement apart
This takes about fifteen minutes with a phone or a camera that has a burst mode.
- Find a plain wall with regular marks on it, such as a brick wall, a fence or a tiled wall. This is your grid.
- Work outdoors in bright light so the camera can use a fast shutter speed.
- Stand square to the wall and keep the camera still. Do not follow the subject.
- Ask someone to walk, then run, then jump past the wall, from one side of the frame to the other. Shoot a burst for each.
- Pick eight to twelve frames from one burst and lay them out in a row, in order, at the same size.
Look for the position you did not expect: the frame where both feet are off the ground, or where the arms are somewhere you would never have drawn them. That surprise is what Muybridge’s first viewers felt.
Questions people ask about Eadweard Muybridge
What did Muybridge prove about a galloping horse?
His 1878 photographs showed that all four hooves leave the ground at the same time during the stride. This happens when the legs are tucked under the body, not when they are fully stretched, which is how artists had shown it.
Did Eadweard Muybridge invent motion pictures?
He did not make films on a strip. His zoopraxiscope projected painted images from a spinning glass disk, and it is regarded as an early movie projector and a step toward cinema. His hall at the 1893 Chicago exposition has been described as the first commercial movie theatre.
Was Muybridge tried for murder?
Yes. He shot Harry Larkyns in October 1874 and was tried in February 1875. The jury acquitted him, treating the killing as justifiable homicide.
Where can Muybridge’s work be seen?
Kingston Museum, in the town where he was born and died, holds his bequest of more than 3,000 items. It includes the original zoopraxiscope and its glass disks, lecture slides, Animal Locomotion plates and a copy of the 1878 San Francisco panorama.
Muybridge is one of the photographers in the A to Z of photographers, and the history of photography places his work among the processes and inventions of its century.