Eadweard Muybridge
Is there a moment in time at which a trotting horse's four hooves are all in the air? The affirmative answer, provided by Eadweard Muybridge's photographs, not only resolved a nagging question for equine aficionados everywhere, but also transformed how we look at the world. Born in 1830 in England, Muybridge emigrated to San Francisco, and by 1867 had become well-known as an architectural and landscape photographer. His reputation led to his being hired for documentary projects by the California Geological Survey and the United States Army. It also led to his being hired by California Governor Leland Stanford to answer the question about horse locomotion. Muybridge collaborated with engineer John D. Issacs to create a triggering system that could take successive photographs of a horse as it went by. This work was interrupted by a crime of passion: in 1874, Muybridge killed his wife's lover, but was acquitted of the killing as being "justifiable homicide." Returning to his photographic work, in 1877, Muybridge produced a photograph of Stanford's horse Occident with all four hooves in the air. The following year, Muybridge created a sequential series of photographs documenting all stages of the horse's motion. In 1879, Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope, a forerunner to the modern movie projector, which took images redrawn from Muybridge's sequential photos and projected them for an audience. He also continued to study locomotion at the University of Pennsylvania between 1884 and 1887, culminating in the printing of a 781-plate portfolio entitled Animal Locomotion. Muybridge returned to England in 1894, and died in 1904. In 1982, a chamber opera by Philip Glass, The Photographer, revisited Muybridge's crime of passion through the lens of a minimalistic musical score reminiscent of his sequential photographs.
