University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, USA
(Eadweard Muybridge / Library of Congress)
When this sequence of photographs was taken, Eadweard Muybridge was already well known – a result of the large-scale images he took of California’s Yosemite in 1868. Today, though, it is his studies in locomotion for which he is most widely famed. In total, he generated more than 100,000 stills of people and animals in motion.
The original trigger for this body of work was the idle question of race-horse owner Leland Stanford: did a horse raise all four hooves from the ground at once while trotting? Stanford hired Muybridge to answer the question, and in the process, Muybridge pioneered the photography of locomotion.
Muybridge was born with the slightly less enigmatic name of Edward Muggeridge – ‘Eadweard Muybridge’ was, he believed, its true Anglo-Saxon spelling. In 1874 he killed his wife Flora’s lover with a gun at point-blank range, but the jury in his trial regarded the death as justifiable homicide, and Muybridge was acquitted.
‘Should certain phases of the movements be of sufficient naturally artistic value to permit their being copied without derogation to artistic effect, it is unnecessary to say it is not for that purpose they are published; their mission is simply to furnish a guide to the laws which control animal movements.’
Preface to Animals in Motion: an electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal progressive movements, Eadweard Muybridge, 1887
