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Born Edward James Muggeridge in Surrey, England, Eadweard Muybridge is famed for his pioneering photographic studies of motion, which greatly impacted both art and science.

Muybridge travelled extensively, and used various names and pseudonyms, particularly in his younger years. At the age of 20, in 1850, Muybridge immigrated to the United States as a bookseller, first in New York City and then in San Francisco. Prior to a planned return to Europe, Muybridge sustained a serious head injury in a stagecoach crash in Texas that likely contributed to what many reported as eccentric behavior throughout his life. After a period of recovery stateside, Muybridge did return to England, where he likely learned photography, including the wet-plate collodion process. He returned to San Francisco in 1867, where he transformed a carriage into a portable darkroom that he called “Helios’ Flying Studio” and was successful in selling his own stereograph cards.

Muybridge received a commission in 1872 that would prove pivotal: former California governor Leland Stanford asked the photographer to document his home and personal effects, including the racehorse Occident. The challenge of capturing the horse in motion captivated Muybridge, who developed more and more sophisticated methods of photographic documentation. He achieved success in 1878 with a series of 12 cameras, amazing people worldwide with his process and its result, which, among other things, showed that all four hooves of a running horse are regularly completely off of the ground.

Beginning in 1883, Muybridge worked at the University of Pennsylvania to create more than 100,000 images. The fruits of his labor were published in an 11-volume series in 1887: Animal Locomotion: an Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements featured 20,000 of Muybridge’s photographs. He would lecture and share his research worldwide, including his zoopraxiscope and phenakistoscope discs, until his death in 1904. It is hard to overstate his influence on countless artists and researchers across disciplines; as the Tate Britian put it, “His influence has forever changed our understanding and interpretation of the world.”