Eadweard Muybridge

Born in Kingston upon Thames, England, on April 9, 1830, he was originally named Edward James Muggeridge. He later settled in the United States and built a career as a photographer, first earning attention for striking landscape views of the American West, including Yosemite and San Francisco.

He is most famous for his groundbreaking studies of motion. In the 1870s, his sequential photographs of a galloping horse showed that all four hooves leave the ground at once, answering a much-debated question and demonstrating the power of photography to capture what the human eye could not easily see. He went on to produce extensive motion studies of people and animals, later collected in the influential work Animal Locomotion.

His work also reached beyond still photography. By developing ways to project sequences of images, including with his zoopraxiscope, he became an important figure in the early history of moving pictures. He died on May 8, 1904, but his images still feel fresh because they sit at the meeting point of art, science, and cinema.