In the end, Muybridge found himself lecturing with his zoopraxiscope to mostly empty seats at a small theatre he put up on the fairgrounds of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. The university delicately extracted itself from its patronage. Muybridge took advantage of their offer with a sudden interest in photographing naked women. In 1883 the University of Pennsylvania, looking for some scientific and artistic prestige, hired Muybridge to conduct his photographic experiments on their campus. Then, as now, it is dangerous to cross a man of great wealth. Resentful that French scientists and artists were fawning over Muybridge, while nobody paid attention to him, Stanford returned home and did everything he could to sabotage Muybridge’s career. His friendship with Stanford ended, however, when the two went to Europe. In later years, Muybridge perfected what he called his “zoopraxiscope,” a projector of glass slides, and regaled audiences across the country with his moving pictures.
The animal did go airborne at regular intervals in its running. It was a certainly a great moment in the history of photography. Bell explains with reasonable lucidity the mechanical adaptations - a camera shutter operated by electricity, a trigger mechanism for those shutters, also electric - that allowed Muybridge to photograph the horse’s movement without a blur. The reader almost loses sight of the climactic moment of Ball’s narrative, in the summer of 1878, when Muybridge lined up twelve cameras to record the running of one of Stanford’s horses. It was one of the most disgusting episodes in the history of American capitalism. Meanwhile, farmers dependent on the railroad to ship their crops had their lifeblood drained by its monopolistic freight rates.
“Leland and Jenny found it a full time occupation just trying to spend it.” “No one had seen this kind of money before,” Ball writes. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanfordįrom this railroad Stanfield derived untold wealth - enough and more to build a 50-room mansion and travel to Europe snatching up every rare and beautiful artifact in sight. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Using that money, Stanford went on to create, with the help of the United States Congress and three other businessmen as wicked as he was, the Central Pacific Railroad. In an uncharacteristic gamble, Stanford bought a piece of a mine which to everybody’s surprise paid off. Leland Stanford was born in 1824 near Albany, New York, to a family of “woodcutters and ditch diggers and farmers,” and became moderately prosperous in California, selling equipment to miners during the gold rush. Reproduced in the book, they remain stunning.Īnd what of the tycoon? Bell spends much less time on Stanfield than he does on Muybridge, but few will complain.
In the meantime, he pursued his successful career as photographer, never lacking customers and patrons, especially after his spectacular series of photographs of Yosemite Valley. Muybridge abandoned the boy to an orphanage on the suspicion he was Larkyns’s child, and that was it, the short and un-edifying history of Muybridge’s love life. His wife, who had given birth to a son while married, died of influenza not long after the trial. His clothes were rumpled - late in life, when he was famous and not at all hard up, he wore pants so dilapidated, an associate recalled, that “it was not safe for him to go outside.” He also liked to eat cheese flies, little insects that hovered around old cheese.
For another, he didn’t seem to believe in grooming and let his beard grow down to the middle of his chest. For one thing, he didn’t like to photograph people, a large part of the trade. He succeeded in this vocation against all odds. Muybridge’s true forté - a combination of mechanical aptitude and visual sense - eventually found expression with photography. Among the items he sold were photographs. At the age of 20 he sailed to New York City where he worked as a sales representative for a company that offered, in Bell’s words, “upmarket books and prints, respectable things, encyclopaedias for the parlor, lithographs you could frame.” A few years later, he moved to San Francisco to found his own book store - an unpromising enterprise in a rough-hewn, bare-knuckled, migrant city where a third of the population didn’t even speak English. Muybridge was born in a suburb of London in 1830 as Edward Muggeridge - he changed his name a number of times in the course of his career, ending with Eardweard Muybridge when he was 52.