For those in the art community, Eadweard Muybridge is famously known as a pioneer of photography and also regarded as the “Father of the Motion Picture.” Muybridge was more than that though. In England he was also a known “inventor,” holding a number of patents for photography equipment and in California he was known as an “acquitted murderer.” Yet, even those who know minute details of his life and of the multiple titles that Muybridge became known for, few know of the “thought movement” he helped shape outside of the art community with his work.

Originally born, as Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames, England on April 9, 1830, the young Edward adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge because he wanted to use the old Anglo-Saxon spelling of his name because it sounded “archaic.” Initially, Muybridge was bookseller in New York and in San Francisco after he immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty. It wouldn’t be until he returned to London in 1860, now in his thirties, that Muybridge eventually learned about photography as he recuperated from injuries he sustained in a horse carriage accident. Then in 1867, he returned to San Francisco, this time looking photograph the Yosemite Valley. Unbeknownst to him, it would be those astounding landscape photographs that would grant him worldwide recognition.

Due to his world fame, Muybridge was hired by Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford Univeristy, to help him settle a bet he had made in regards to a common debate of the time: Do horses achieve flight during galloping? Stanford believed that a horses all four legs left the ground during running, essentially allowing him to “fly” through the air. Beginning in 1872, Muybridge experimented and improved his protocols in capturing a horse inmovement. He used a series of cameras set to take images at different intervals to be able to capture still frames of the horse during movement. After a series of failures and small stint in prison for murder, he eventually managed to capture a horse “flying” in 1977. The images were so astounding that not only did Stanford win his bet, but Muybridges images were placed in the cover of magazines such as Scientific American.

His work in still frame photography eventually led to the motion picture movement in the years to follow, yet his work also led to a whole different type of movement within the scientific community. In the aftermath of his The Horse in Motion work, Muybridge was able to secure funding and resources from the University of Pennsylvania for his follow up work:  Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. These series of photographs of animals and humans captured in frames mid-movement saw the birth of biomechanical and locomotor studies in the field of anatomy and anthropology.

To this day, if one follows the citations of research papers having to do with the evolution of locomotion or the effects of biomechanics during movement in Journals such as American Journal of Physical Anthropology and other anatomical journals, Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion will appear in the references page.  Muybridge was not only an eccentric and pioneering artist, he was also a scientist who was the first to look at locomotion and help bring the field in which I am part of come to existence.

– J

References

Clegg, B. (2007). The man who stopped time. Joseph Henry.

Hendricks, G. (1975). Eadweard Muybridge: the father of the motion picture. Secker & Warburg.

Muybridge, E. (2012). Animals in motion. Courier Corporation.

Presentation Slides

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