Eadweard Muybridge
Muybridge devised a method for taking photographs with a fraction of a second exposure time and set up 12 cameras along a track on Stanford’s estate with reporters as witnesses. When a horse passed by, it tripped wires attached to the cameras, which took 12 images in a row. The Zoopraxiscope (meaning ‘life-action-view’ in Greek) was invented by Muybridge in 1879. The edge of a glass disk was mapped with Muybridge’s images of animals and humans.
He lectured widely on his work during his career in North America and Europe, profoundly affecting visual artists and the emerging fields of scientific and industrial photography. Muybridge desired adventure and decided to see the globe as a young man. In 1850, he immigrated to the United States and began working as a bookseller in New York. Before being fatally wounded in a runaway stagecoach crash, Muybridge was a popular bookseller. He returned to the United States six years later with hopes of being a filmmaker. In 1872, businessman and nobleman Leland Stanford commissioned Muybridge to produce a photograph that would settle the long-debated question of whether there is a point in a horse’s gait where all four hooves are off the ground at the same time. Muybridge eventually succeeded in taking photographs of the horse in motion in 1878, using a wet plate technique, showing that there is a time when all four horse legs are gathered under the body. Sallie Gardner, a Kentucky-bred mare, was his inspiration.
As you’ll see in the video above, Muybridge’s visual studies on horse gaits led him and others to reveal that not only can all four legs of a horse leave the ground when thundering, but still photographs taken in fast succession and shown in a similar manner can also provide the appearance of movement. In reality, one of Thomas Edison’s greatest sources of inspiration for the invention of the movie camera was Muybridge’s experiments.
He also developed the ‘Zoopraxiscope,’ the first projection to display moving images of photographic live action. In both the United States and Europe, Muybridge used the Zoopraxiscope to demonstrate his lectures.
Apart from wildlife, Muybridge photographed human models produced by the Philadelphia Almshouse, which is located near Penn’s campus, as well as members of the University community. His models were photographed in various action scenes, including going up and down steps, hammering on an anvil, holding buckets of water, and pouring water over each other, against a measuring grid backdrop. Muybridge’s sequences covered a wide range of subjects, including agricultural, industrial, building, and household work, as well as military drills and daily activities.
Muybridge used zoopraxiscope to demonstrate his lectures in the United States and Europe for the next 15 years. He had ceased using the system by 1895 and had also requested the negatives from his later colour cartoon discs be lost completely. He did not want to endanger his professional reputation by releasing later discs that were too fallacious in comparison to his photographic tests.
