Anglo-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge pioneered motion photography and motion-picture projection. Born in England, he moved to the United States around 1850, working as a bookseller. He returned to England in the 1860s, taking up photography. He returned to the States in 1867, settling in San Francisco, and quickly gained fame for his stunning photos of Yosemite Valley.
Between 1877 and 1884, Muybridge captured groundbreaking images of a horse in motion, using multiple cameras and proving that a galloping horse has all four feet off the ground. His photographs, commissioned by California governor and race-horse owner, Leland Stanford, immediately influenced how artists depicted horses in motion. In the 1880s he continued working with multiple cameras to make the series of stop-motion photographs of humans and animals in motion that would become his book Animal Locomotion. In 1887-88 he worked at University of Pennsylvania, where one of his collaborators was the painter Thomas Eakins. Muybridge also invented the zoopraxiscope, which allowed him to project his photographs in sequence, creating an early form of motion picture.
