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Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture
by Gordon Hendricks.
Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, U.S.A., 2001.
ISBN: 0-486-41535-X.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart, IA 52224-9767, U.S.A.
E-mail: ballast@netins.net
This is a biography of one of the oddest, most fascinating characters in art history. Born Edward James Muggeridge in England in 1830, he is remembered now as Eadweard Muybridge, the name he adopted after emigrating to the U.S. in his 20s, and setting up shop in California as a photographer. During his lifetime, and to great extent today, he was known for his panoramic views of the West, particularly the Yosemite Valley, Central America, and San Francisco, which could be bought as single prints or as spectacular stereo pairs. (In this book, he is shown seated on the edge of Contemplation Rock, a photo later used in court by his defense lawyer to suggest that he was mentally unstable.) As a prominent landscape photographer, Muybridge became acquainted with Leland Stanford, Governor of California, for whom Stanford University was named, a railroad tycoon and race horse owner, who hired Muybridge to record the movements of Occident, his finest horse, while trotting full speed. Muybridge spent his remaining life making sequential still photographs of animals and humans in motion (engaged in all sorts of activities), sometimes projecting them onto a screen as prototypical "moving pictures." There are several good books on Muybridge, but this one is especially fine because of its exhaustive detail, including 200 photographs, news articles, and engravings. An entire chapter is given to a scandalous period in Muybridge's life, which began with his discovery (c.1874) that a photograph of his infant son, Florado Helios, had "Little Harry" written on the back of it. Convinced (apparently correctly) that his young wife had been sleeping with a con man, one George Harry Larkyns, he tracked him, called him out, and shot him dead. At Muybridge's murder trial in 1875, he successfully pleaded "not guilty," claiming that the shooting was justified by the adultery. Leaving the courtroom, he was applauded by a crowd. His former wife, age 24, who was suddenly terribly ill, died a few months later, while his son (or was it Larkyns'?) was sent to an orphanage, then worked as a garden laborer until his death in a car accident in Sacramento in 1944.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 16, No. 4, Summer 2001.)
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