Eadweard Muybridge Research Paper

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Eadweard Muybridge was a remarkable English photographer born in 1830. At the beginning of his photography career he was mostly interested in capturing scenes of the Wild West in his mobile darkroom. However, he is most notable for his invention of the Zoopraxiscope. In 1872, Leland Stanford, former governor of California, businessman and race-horse owner, had a sparked interest in a (then) controversial topic. He wanted to know whether or not all four of a horse’s legs are simultaneously in the air at a given time while galloping. Stanford hired Muybridge to solve this case with the modern-day advancements of photography. Muybridge, being an experimental photographer, came up with a way to execute the project: He placed many large glass-plate …show more content…

Later on, this device was considered one of the earliest movie projectors. The Zoopraxiscope process is regarded as an early and imperative stage toward cinematography and motion pictures. In addition, Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope served to combine three already existing visual devices that were popular in the 19th century: photography, the zoetrope and the magic lantern. Both Zoetropes (which were spinning drums) and Phenakistoscope (which were spinning discs) could already create a pictorial animation, although the outcome could not be projected. Lanterns had indeed been able to project images ever since the 17th century, but could not capture lifelike or realistic motion. What Muybridge did to originally create the Zoopraxiscope was to take the animated illusion of movement from moving image toys to blend with the projection in the magic lantern. Then he would adapt pictures from his motion photography and created a technology which could project sequences of rapid movement given from the camera onto a screen. Therefore, to many theorists, Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope is considered an extraordinary milestone in the history of the moving image; a link between slide projections and

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