Eadweard Muybridge

Born in Kingston upon Thames in 1830, Eadweard Muybridge became one of the most important early photographers of movement. After moving to the United States, he built a reputation for striking landscape photographs of the American West, including Yosemite and San Francisco.

He is most famous for his motion studies, especially his experiments showing how a horse moves at full gallop. By using multiple cameras in sequence, he created images that answered questions the human eye could not easily settle, and his later work in Animal Locomotion recorded people and animals in motion with extraordinary detail.

Muybridge's work sits at the meeting point of art, science, and the beginnings of cinema. He died in 1904, but his experiments with sequential images and projection remain a key part of the story of photography and film.