Eadweard muybridge is known for
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He returned to San Francisco in 1867, a man with a markedly changed personality. The horse and rider, rendered as silhouettes due to the lighting conditions and exposure time, are shown at the centre of each frame against a lined and numbered backdrop; the frames are arranged in a grid. These stages are clearly numbered and progress in a clockwise spiral within a larger dark oval.
The mammoth plates used by Muybridge afford an unprecedented level of detail in each print, with architectural details, vehicles and ships in the harbour's haze all rendered legibly. Muybridge has taken the three images that comprise the panorama from a signal station above the army camp; the many tents and figures shown are small against the vast landscape, which occupies the bulk of the frame.
Muybridge took Stanford to court for damages over this, spending three years arguing a case that he ultimately lost. His photographs of the Californian landscapes experiment with perspective and painterly effects, while his work for various government bureaux offers early examples of the ways in which photography could serve a propaganda role.
Stillman and Leland Stanford, in which the pair downplayed Muybridge's contributions to the earlier motion studies, suggesting that he was hired simply to execute the ideas of others. 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.
Each of these twelve images show a horse, with rider, paused at a different moment in her paces.
By this point, Muybridge had begun experimenting with animating his photographic sequences through an invention he labelled the 'praxinoscope.' This worked similarly to a zoetrope, with a spinning mechanism and mirrors used to create bright, continuous images.
Muybridge's work as a technological innovator played a significant role in the subsequent development of moving images by William Dickson and Thomas Edison.
Muybridge's most pronounced impact was on painters taking animals as subject matter; his studies of horses in motion provided insights that shaped the ways in which Edgar Degas and Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier represented these animals.
Stanford was interested in whether horses lifted all legs off the ground at once during trotting, and Muybridge was engaged to take photographs to settle the point. Perhaps to distinguish his work from that of other photographers of Yosemite, such as Watkins and Charles Leander Weed (plate 27), Muybridge chose points of view that heighten dramatic intensity.
That same year he made his first trip to the Yosemite Valley.
In direct competition with Carleton Watkin's acclaimed Yosemite views of 1861–62 (Plate 26), Muybridge's fifty-one mammoth plates, made in 1872, confirmed his reputation as a preeminent landscape photographer. By 1856 he had opened a bookstore in San Francisco. In the twelfth frame, the horse and rider are shown at a standstill.
He also edited and published compilations of his work (some of which are still in print today), which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. Muybridge's most pioneering work was in the study of motion, capturing horses, humans and other animals carrying out a range of actions; his reduced exposure times allowed for sequences to be frozen into sets of images, resulting in a greater understanding of anatomy.
Muybridge's photographs were intended to capture the territory on which the battles had been fought both for reporting and for future reference. His stagecoach, however, hit a tree in Texas, leaving Muybridge with a severe head injury. 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.