A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, The Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Sally Hacker Prize for the History of Technology “A panoramic vision of cultural change” —The New York Times Through the story of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the author of Orwell's Roses explores what it was about California in the late 19th-century that enabled it to become such a center of technological and cultural innovation The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.

Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change offers a unique opportunity to trace the life and complex art of the 19th century photographer. This book places his entire body of work - both artistic and technical - in the context of one of the most transformative periods of American and European history. Published to accompany a retrospective exhibition organized bythe Corcoran Gallery of Art, this catalogue includes essays by Philip Brookman, Marta Braun, Corey Keller, and Rebecca Solnit that investigate a variety of new ways to understand and interpret Muybridge's art and influences. Born in England, Eadweard J. Muybridge (1830-1904) moved in his early twenties to the United States, where he was soon drawn to the dramatic Western landscape. After a stagecoach accident, during a long convalescence in England, he learned photography. Returning to San Francisco in 1867, he soon earned his reputation photographing both the landscape and urban development of the West. Muybridge is best known for this inventive work and his massive atlas of stop-action motion studies, Animal Locomotion, first published in 1887.

In 1872 an Englishman called Edward Muybridge photographed a horse in California and thereby invented the essentials of motion picture technology. His patron wanted to know if the horse ever lifted all four hooves at once. This is the story of Muybridge and modern technology.

Best known for his contribution to the development of the motion picture, Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) was a pioneering photographer during his lifetime. Alongside his remarkable photographic achievements, his personal life was riddled with melodrama—including a near-fatal stagecoach accident and a betrayal by his wife that ended with Muybridge being tried for the murder of her lover. Marta Braun’s revealing biography traces the sensational events of Muybridge’s life and his personal reinventions as artist, photographer, researcher, and showman. In the 1870s, Muybridge’s photography skills were enlisted by Leland Stanford, a racehorse breeder who later founded Stanford University, to prove the “unsupported motion controversy”—the theory that during a horse’s stride, there was a moment when all four of its legs left the ground. The resulting collection of motion studies, as Braun explains, inspired Muybridge to take photography beyond landscapes to the realm of science. He went on to invent the zoopraxiscope, which captures movement too quick for the human eye to record. Most importantly, simulating motion through a series of stills, his pioneering use of sequence photography served as a forerunner to the introduction of cinematography in the 1890s. This illuminating study examines a man whose influence has resounded through generations. In Eadweard Muybridge, Braun firmly establishes Muybridge’s central contributions to the history of art, science, photography, and motion pictures.

"196 plates (containing over 4700 individual photographs) from the famous Muybridge collection, chosen for their value to artists, doctors, and researchers"--Jacket.

More than 4,000 photographs in series and stopped action of horses, cats, lions, deer, kangaroos, etc. Indispensable for animal artists. Classic of 19th-century photography. "Impressive and valuable collection." — Scientific American.

Sixty of the best, most representative sequences from original 5,000 prints. Taken at speeds up to 1/6000th of a second, incredibly precise images show undraped male and female subjects in many activities.

Photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), often termed the father of the motion picture, presented his iconic Animal Locomotion series in 1887. Produced under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania and encompassing thousands of photographs of humans and animals in motion, the series included more than 300 plates of nude men and women engaged in activities such as swinging a baseball bat, playing leapfrog, and performing housework—an astonishing fact given the period’s standards of propriety. In the first sustained examination of these nudes and the remarkable success of their production, wide circulation, and reception, Indecent Exposures positions this revolutionary enterprise as central to crucial advancements of the modern era. Muybridge’s nudes ushered in new attitudes toward science and progress, including Darwinian ideas about human evolution and hierarchy; quickened debates over the role of photography and scientific investigation in art; and offered innovative perspectives on the human body. This fascinating story is copiously illustrated, and includes many lesser-known photographs published here for the first time.

Eadweard Muybridge is among the seminal originators of the contemporary world's visual form, with its concentrated image-sequences of bodies in movement and its ocular obsessions. This book examines an almost unknown dimension of Muybridge's work, as a moving-image projectionist, who toured Europe's cities to enthral beyond-capacity audiences with unprecedented projections and who built a moving-image auditorium - long before cinemas were created - in which to project his work at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. That final invention of Muybridge's was both an all-engulfing catastrophe and the vital precursor for the following century's worldwide manias for projection. Based on entirely new research into Muybridge's travels, audiences, auditoria and projectors, this book explores his initiating role in moving-image projection and also maps Muybridge's driving inspiration for subsequent artists and filmmakers preoccupied with the volatile entity of projection, from 1890s Berlin to contemporary Japan, via further spectacular World's Exposition events and cinemas' overheated projection-boxes. The book looks closely at the enigmatic figure of the moving-image projectionist, from its origins in Muybridge's experiments, across glass, celluloid and digital projections, to the contemporary moment. Moving-image projection formed a crucial determinant in the imagining of new corporealities and new urban spaces, through its irrepressible capacity to envision future bodies and cities. The cinema projectionist - a solitary figure of compulsion and restlessness, inhabiting a profession touched with the multiple addictions and deaths of the moving image - was once a pivotal presence for global cinema audiences but is now consigned to near-obsolescence. The book investigates contemporary urban projections as aberrant manifestations derived from Muybridge's first conjurations of projection's power for its spectators. Throughout, the book interrogates.

With essays by David Harris and Eric Sandweiss. Preface by Phyllis Lambert. These photographs from the CCA collection and other private and public collections document one of the supreme technical and conceptual achievements in the history of architectural photography. On July 14, 1877, Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) announced in the San Francisco Chronicle the publication of a set of photographs, Panorama of San Francisco from California Street Hill. It was available in two formats: as a set of albumen prints mounted on cabinet cards, and as an album of 11 albumen prints. Approximately one year later, Muybridge rephotographed the view, this time using a mammothplate camera. The result, a breathtaking 360-degree panorama measuring more than 17 feet in length, was published as an album, comprising 13 albumen prints. This book documents Muybridge's panoramas of a now-vanished San Francisco, and also discusses the antecedents of his work, thereby placing it within its historical context.