Eadweard Muybridge
1830 – 1904
The photographer who first stopped time and set pictures in motion
About Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge on April 9, 1830, in Kingston upon Thames, England, the son of a grain and coal merchant. As a young man he changed the spelling of his name several times, eventually settling on the archaic-looking "Eadweard Muybridge," which he believed reflected its Anglo-Saxon roots. Around the age of twenty he emigrated to the United States, working as a bookseller and publisher's agent first in…
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![[Eadweard Muybridge, bust, facing right], 1893](/static/images/2006687151_thumb.webp)
Notable Works
The Horse in Motion ("Sallie Gardner at a Gallop")
Muybridge's most famous achievement: a sequence of photographs of the mare Sallie Gardner, owned by Leland Stanford, running over the Palo Alto track on June 19, 1878. Made with a bank of cameras…
Browse the collection →Animal Locomotion
A monumental study published in 1887 from work carried out at the University of Pennsylvania between 1883 and 1886. Issued as 781 collotype plates drawn from more than 100,000 photographs, it…
Browse the collection →Yosemite Valley Views
Mammoth-plate landscape photographs of the Yosemite Valley made during Muybridge's 1872 expedition, following an earlier visit in 1867. Working under the pseudonym "Helios," he captured the valley's…
Browse the collection →Timeline
Born Edward James Muggeridge on April 9 in Kingston upon Thames, England
Emigrates to the United States around this time, working as a bookseller in New York and San Francisco
Suffers serious head injuries in a stagecoach crash in Texas and returns to England to recuperate
Makes his first photographic expedition to the Yosemite Valley, working under the name "Helios"
Returns to photograph Yosemite with mammoth-plate cameras; begins motion experiments for Leland Stanford
"We have become so accustomed to see [the galloping horse] in art that it has imperceptibly dominated our understanding, and we think the representation to be unimpeachable, until we throw off all our preconceived impressions on one side, and seek the truth by independent observation from Nature herself."
— Eadweard Muybridge