Man in Locomotion

Born Edward Muggeridge in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1830, the Anglo-American workaholic Eadweard Muybridge looms large in the history of photography. Traveller, adventurer, artist, photographer, entrepreneur, inventor, showman, jealous husband, murderer, he is best remembered today for the more than 20,000 stop-action images in which he captured successive stages of animal and human locomotion. For his invention in 1879 of the zoopraxiscope, a device containing a turning glass disc for projecting “moving” pictures, he is considered one of the fathers of cinema.

More than a century after his death in 1904, Muybridge’s work is enjoying a reappraisal. While he saw his work as serious and educational, audiences today see it as playful and slightly weird. Last year at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the exhibition Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change was the first museum exhibition to examine all aspects of his achievement. London’s Tate...