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Eadweard J. Muybridge
  Born in England in 1830, Eadweard J. Muybridge immigrated to the United States at age 22 and settled in San Francisco, working as a bookseller. He later went back to England to study photography and, upon his return to San Francisco in 1866, founded a mobile studio. In the 1870s he gained fame for his panoramas of San Francisco and mammoth-plate views of Yosemite, as well as his documenting of the Modoc Indian War. To verify the claim by Étienne-Jules Marey that a horse at full gallop sometimes has all four legs off the ground, Muybridge invented a photographic method of decomposing the animal’s movements, later applying the technique to extensive investigations of the way human and animals move. His most important work, the 11-volume Animal Locomotion (1887), contains nearly 20,000 photographs grouped into 781 sequences, taken between 1872 and 1885. Muybridge died in England in 1904.

 



Edweard Muybridge (1830-1904), Animal Locomotion, 1887, phototype, Planche 578,
47,9 X 60,4 cm. Collection du Musée d’art de Joliette, Don de Jack Greenwald.