It’s Throwback Thursday! Today, April 9th, is the anniversary of Eadweard Muybridge’s birth in 1830.
MICA is lucky enough to have an original 1887 edition of Muybridge’s pioneering work Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements 1872-1885 (TR140 .M79 A48 1887 Cage).
The set of one hundred plates were donated to the Institute’s library in 1887 by then President Cushing and William H. Carpenter, editor of the Sun. The set also miraculously managed to survive the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904.
“Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.
In the 1880s, Muybridge entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography.”
Another interesting fact from Muybridge’s life? In 1874 he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife’s lover, but was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide.
-read more here.
To see anything in our special collections, please ask a reference librarian for assistance.
GIFs from Wikimedia.