Eadweard muybridge biography channel
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One of the people who became aware of this research was Leland Stanford, a former governor of California, who owned a number of race horses. His studies of bodies, animal and human, provided a substantial body of data that informed understanding of anatomy and motion, informing artists as distinct as Thomas Eakins, who studied Muybridge's photographs in order to enhance the realism of his work, and Marcel Duchamp, who drew from Muybridge's work as he explored repetition and distortion, using abstraction as a means of exploring the uncanny nature of making visible that which is beyond human perception.
Muybridge took Stanford to court for damages over this, spending three years arguing a case that he ultimately lost.
He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name.
He immigrated to the UnitedStates as a young man but remainedobscureuntil 1868, when his largephotographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world famous. He was born in the busy market town of Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, on 9 April 1830, as the second son of John and Susannah Muggeridge, and baptised at All Saints' church a short walk away.
The images, arranged together, numbered and retouched before being reproduced through photography in Muybridge's studio, are neat enough as to appear more as a drawn diagram than a series of photographic exposures. In reanimating a horse within an exhibition space, from a set of still images, the photographer used technology to gain mastery over nature and opened up possibilities for further experimentation with the moving image, laying groundwork for motion pictures and photographic performance art.
Collotype
Biography of Eadweard Muybridge
Childhood
Eadweard Muybridge, then Edward James Muggeridge, was born in Kingston-upon-Thames, a market town southwest of London, in 1830.
Right: An ostrich, ca.
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)
Documentary, Scientific
Documentary, Scientific |
Biography: Edward James Muggeridge was born in Kingston on Thames, and it is said that because this area is associated with the coronation of Saxon kings, he took on a name closely resembling (as he saw it) the Anglo Saxon equivalent.
In 1872, violence broke out after the US Army arrested the Native American Kinstspuash, who led the Modoc resistance against forced resettlement. The photographer died in 1904, at the Kingston-upon-Thames home of his cousin, Catherine Edith Smith. (b) Close-up of one of the kings' names inscribed on the base ("Eadweard"). More prosaically, he is known to have suffered and died of "a four-months' disease of the prostate gland" (Henricks 226).
He not only proved Leland right, but also showed that, contrary to what painters had depicted, a horse's feet are not, as hitherto believed, outstretched, as if like a rocking- horse, but bunched together under the belly. For this experiment, he adopted the idea of using strategically placed cameras from his fellow-photographer, based in England, Oscar Rejlander.
During these years, in the early to mid-sixties, he learned the process that would be so important to his later discoveries — wet plate photography (see "Eadweard Muybridge..." and Schaaf).
Muybridge's photographs of the horse in motion. The images are similar to his earlier shots of a horse running; the man in these frames appears in the centre of each, against a white background, with a measuring system at the base of his body.
Left: "'Sallie Gardner,' owned by Leland Stanford, running at a 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19 June: 2 frames showing diagram of foot movements. New York: Grossman (Viking), 1975. in Braun 14). It took a little time, however, for Muybridge to perfect a way of photographing which would supply the answer, for the Collodion process was rather slow.
Whilst working on this project Muybridge also undertook other assignments, and it was on his return from one of these, we are told, that he became aware that his wife was having an affair with another soldier.
These meant that he was able to isolate particular moments, famously capturing the stages of motion, showing the audiences the positions through which animal and human bodies shifted while performing actions, which lead to advances in areas as diverse as zoology, painting, and motion pictures.