Eadweard Muybridge

Born in Kingston upon Thames in 1830, Eadweard Muybridge began life as Edward James Muggeridge and later adopted the distinctive name by which he is remembered. After moving to the United States, he built a reputation as a photographer, especially for dramatic views of Yosemite, San Francisco, and other western landscapes.

Muybridge became famous in the 1870s for his motion studies. Working on a famous series showing a galloping horse, he used multiple cameras to capture split-second stages of movement, helping settle a popular debate about whether all four hooves ever left the ground at once. He later expanded these experiments into extensive studies of people and animals in motion, collected in Animal Locomotion, and developed the zoopraxiscope, an early device for projecting moving images.

His work sits at an important crossroads between photography and cinema. Today he is remembered not only as a technical pioneer, but also as an artist whose images changed science, visual culture, and the history of film.