Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge , photographer American of English origin, celebrates for its photographic decompositions of the movement, and its famous stereotype “the gallop of Daisy”. Born Edward James Muggeridge, with Kingston upon Thames, in the suburbs of London the April 9th 1830, died the May 8th 1904. It changed name to find the Anglo-Saxon origin of this one.

Beginnings of a famous photographer

Born with Kingston-one-Thames (England) on April 9th 1830, Eadweard Muybridge emigrates with the the United States at the 22 years age, while passing like the majority of the emigrants by New York, then San Francisco, where it starts to work as editor. A serious accident of diligence, in 1855, can be seen like the explanation of an odd and dull temperament, so much so that some regard it as disturbed. It then turns over to England in order to study photography there, during five years. It made considerable investments there to obtain the photographic material most powerful of the time. Its finished studies, it goes back to San Francisco in 1866. At that time, photography in stereoscopic relief is in vogue. Eadweard notes it, and is made a name by creating an itinerant studio of photography, with which it photographs the surroundings of San Francisco. Its panorama with 360° of the city (carried out in 1877) becomes famous, the Californian elite regularly engages it for portraits. But its fame grows by its collaboration with the Caast and Geadetic Survey as a photographer landscape designer. Its reports of the War of Modocs, as well as the first photographs of the park Yosemite create sensation. They will be preceded in 1867. The same year, he becomes the official photographer of the American military presence in Alaska. Between 1868 and 1873, it surveys the Far-west, where it realizes more than 2000 stereotypes.

Decomposition of the movement

Among its many and rich customers, figure Leland Stanford , impassioned by the stockbreeder, racehorses and trainer. It is by this character that Muybridge takes note of the polemic on the race of the horse. At the time, the French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey affirms that a horse with the gallop sees its legs falling apart of the ground, a highly pushed back vision. A price is promised with that which will solve the problem. To solve the question, Muybridge will use photography. In 1878, it orders in England 24 cameras that it lays out along an equestrian track. By starting them remotely by the means of tended wire, it obtains the famous stereotype which confirms the theory of Marey. The horse used for its experiments prénommait Occident .
It is interested consequently in the movement, animal and human. It develops the Zoopraxiscope, a projector which recomposed the movement by the fast and successive vision of the phases of the movement. The machine is produced as of 1879, then presented to the European public two years during. Its work poses it in precursor Cinéma. Photography oscillates between science and art, thing discussed in the intellectual middle of the time. Muybridge belongs to this generation which uses the photograph as sure and objective scientific testimony. In 1887 is published its more important work, Animal Locomotion , in 11 volumes which contain 100,000 photographs taken between 1872 and 1885. It foams America and Europe, then dies in 1904 in England.

Some work of Muybridge

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