The Horse in Motion

Best known for his photographic studies of humans and animals in motion, Muybridge was an accomplished landscape photographer and developed some of the earliest examples of motion pictures. In 1872, Muybridge was hired by Leland Stanford, then the governor of California and later the founder of Stanford University, to determine whether all of a horse’s feet left the ground simultaneously while running—a popularly debated topic at the time. Muybridge used a line of multiple glass-plate cameras with tripwires to study the effects of motion on humans and animals, creating an early form of stop-motion photography that produced images showing what the eye could not distinguish as separate. During the 1880s, he worked under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, analyzing locomotion and creating the photographic portfolio Animal Locomotion, which deeply influenced the fields of athletics, biomechanics, and the visual arts.