Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge was born in 1830 in Kingston-upon-Thames, England. In 1852 he moved to the United States and settled in San Francisco. After working for a long time as an assistant to a number of photographers, in 1866 he began to devote himself to landscape photography. In 1874 Muybridge shot and killed Harry Larkins, the lover of his wife, Flora Shallcross Stone, but a year later he was acquitted. In 1878 he published serial photographs he had developed with a number of cameras connected to each other. In this way he was able to show for the first time that a galloping horse has all four hooves off the ground at the same time. In 1879 he presented the zoopraxiscope he had invented, which projected a series of individual photographs much like a film. He undertook travels that he documented in photographs, but also continued to record sequences of movement. In addition, he lectured internationally. He developed innovative shutter techniques and experimented with film-developing chemicals. Muybridge died in his birthplace in 1904.