He was
an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic
studies of motion and in motion-picture projection.
He
immigrated to the United States as a young man but remained obscure until 1868,
when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world
famous. Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877
and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action
photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures
that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.
In his
earlier years in San Francisco, Muybridge had become known for his landscape
photography, particularly of the Yosemite Valley. He also photographed the
Tlingit people in Alaska, and was commissioned by the United States Army to
photograph the Modoc War in 1873. In 1874 he shot and killed Major Harry
Larkyns, his wife's lover, and was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of
justifiable homicide.[2] He travelled for more than a year in Central America
on a photographic expedition in 1875.
In the
1880s, Muybridge entered a very productive period at the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and
humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as
separate movements. He spent much of his later years giving public lectures and
demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences. He also
edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual
artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography.
——http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge
