Eadweard Muybridge - Reaktion Books - Critical Lives Author:Marta Braun The life of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) is the stuff of legend. An inventive and sensitive photographer, and a technical wizard who was the first ever to freeze motion with a camera, he was also a man of passion who murdered his wife's lover (although he was acquitted of the crime). Born Edward James Muggeridge, Muybridge reinvented himself s... more »everal times, changing his surname first to Muygridge then to Muybridge, and late in life upgrading the mundane 'Edward' to the saxon, kingly 'Eadweard'. In Eadweard Muybridge, Marta Braun frames the photographer's life within the dramatic transformations brought about by the rapidly developing technologies of the late nineteenth century. Born in Kingston upon Thames, Muybridge travelled to the United States at 22 to seek his fortune, first in New York and then in San Francisco where he set himself up as a publisher's agent and bookseller. As the photographic artist 'Helios', Muybridge became famous in the 1870s for his artistic depictions of the rugged beauty of the us West Coast and its inhabitants, from Modoc warriors to the robber barons who pushed through the transcontinental railway. As Edward Muybridge he documented the indigenous tribes and coffee plantations of Guatemala, the expansion of the American frontier and the gold-rush driven remaking of San Francisco. In 1887, working with scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, he invented a method of stop-action photography that heralded the first motion pictures. As lecturer, flamboyant showman and entertainer, he toured Europe and America with his 'zoopraxiscope', a machine that re-animated his motion sequences. At the end of his life, lonely and disappointed, his fame dwindling and his career faltering, Muybridge retired to his English birthplace, where he died in 1904. Since then his life and work have continued to fire the imagination of artists as varied as Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly and u2. Eadweard Muybridge presents an insightful and lucid account of the life, work and legacy of this highly influential figure, as well as newly discovered information about the photographer's masterpiece, Animal Locomotion.« less