Just Published Today

Books about photographers and photographer biographies have a spotty history at best, but I'm looking forward to this one nonetheless. Ed-weird—sorry, Eadweard, née Edward—Muybridge (formerly Muygridge, formerly Muggeridge) really was one of the oddest characters in British-American photography (born British, worked in the U.S.). And the deeper you go the stranger the tale gets.

Muybridge

I'll be skeptical of the author's objectivity until I know better—I'm not familiar with the work of author Edward Ball—but gratuitous sensationalism is less likely to be a pitfall than it is usually. With Muybridge you don't need to jack up the drama; he really was stranger than fiction.

Here's the publisher's blurb:

From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.

One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures. He was the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth to visual media and screen entertainments of all kinds. Yet the artist and inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial is one of the early instances of a media sensation. His patron was railroad tycoon (and former California governor) Leland Stanford, whose particular obsession was whether four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground at once. Stanford hired Muybridge and his camera to answer that question. And between them, the murderer and the railroad mogul launched the age of visual media.

Set in California during its frontier decades, The Tycoon and the Inventor interweaves Muybridge's quest to unlock the secrets of motion through photography, an obsessive murder plot, and the peculiar partnership of an eccentric inventor and a driven entrepreneur. A tale from the great American West, this popular history unspools a story of passion, wealth, and sinister ingenuity.

It's called The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures. (Here are our links to other purveyors.) Just published today. I've heard that it's another of those pop histories influenced by the success (both artistic and financial) of Erik Larson's rich and entertaining The Devil in the White City, and if so, that can only be to the good.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Doug Howk: "Rebecca Solnit, in River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, has already covered the story. Though Muybridge's work was a precursor to the motion picture, Etienne-Jules Marey's contemporaneous work in France solved much of the technical requirements, eg. 12 images per second."

Comments

[Walter Glover]

Dependent upon treatment, this could be an intriguing book in much the way that the 'Surgeon of Crowthorne' was in its disclosure of the founding of the Oxford Dictionary.

The motif of the Muybridge homicide and trial also motivated Philip Glass to compose his chamber opera, "The Photographer".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Photographer

Cheers,

[Joakim Ahnfelt]

There was an article about him over at Lens rentals some time ago.
http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2012/11/a-most-interesting-photographer

[Very entertaining! I'd missed that one. --Mike]

[Richard Wasserman]

Mike,

Have you read Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows: Edweard Muybridge and the Technological West? It's a sober and fascinating look at Muybridge and the vast changes in the perception of time and space that were taking place in the last quarter of the 19th century. It was the time of railroads, telegraphy, as well as photography and much else all leading to the modern world. I highly recommend it.

[James Sinks]

I'm sure I can't be the first to mention this, but Roger at Lensrentals had a blog post about him not too long ago:

http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2012/11/a-most-interesting-photographer

[Bruce Appelbaum]

Saw that book in B&N the other day. Here is another that is also interesting:

http://www.amazon.com/River-Shadows-Eadweard-Muybridge-Technological/dp/0142004103/ref=la_B001IODD3I_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1358880157&sr=1-5

[Kevin Purcell]

One should also note that Rebecca Solnit did a great job on her Eadweard Muybridge biography River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

The BBC also used it as the basis of a very watchable documentary in 2010 The Weird Adventures of Eadweard Muybridge in the Imagine series.

I recommend both.

His weird name went through a weird evolution too.

He started off a Edward James Muggeridge but switched to Muygridge in the USA then becoming Muybridge on return to the UK. Later he called himself "Eduardo Santiago Muybridge" in Guatemala. He later changed to the old spelling of Eadweard (again on return to the UK). His gravestone has his name as "Eadweard Maybridge". He signed some phots "Helios".

Dead weird, eh?

[Gary]

You should throw up a link to Rebecca Solnit's, River of Shadows. Have you not read that?

[I have not. --Mike]

[Dan Kanagy]

There's also River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit on Muybridge, which I found to be well researched and well written. Less sensationalist marketing, too.

[Miserere]

Mike,

Let's get a KickStarter campaign up and running to buy the movie rights, then TOP can enter the treacherous world of movie production. This is a match made in heaven!

[Rick Popham]

It must be in the air... Back around Thanksgiving, Roger Cicala had a long post about Muybridge on his blog at LensRentals.com

http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2012/11/a-most-interesting-photographer

[Bob Rosinsky]

I think about Muybridge now and again. I blogged about a dog that restlessly paced around my studio. I took random photos, with strobe lighting, to study her restless legs in motion. http://topdogimaging.net/blog/skinny-legs

[Zalman Stern]

Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows would seem to cover this territory very thoroughly already. Her book is so much the opposite of sensational as to make Muybridge's life rather dry and boring. Perhaps we can average the two and get something that is both exciting and historically valid :-)

[david place]

Mike: you might not get anything back but some readers may be interested in knowing that this book is available as an iBook if you search for the shortened title: The Inventor and the Tycoon ... (prefer iBooks over Kindle)

[hugh crawford]

I've seen the opera and it's wonderful, but since it's been mentioned a few times there seem to be a lot of "good morning major" songs out there,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOmDyT0jIw0

and this too

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXnTEVDSxv4

[Rod Graham]

That's a pretty remarkable portrait of Muybridge in your post. Do we know who took that? Is it a self-portrait?

[Ross Chambers]

I've had a Dover book for a while, I'm not sure whether it's still in print: "Muybridge's Animals in Motion" which has film strips which are interesting but also a CD Rom which, in addition to carrying the same images, animates a number of them.

ISBN 0-486-99767-7

[Steve Smith]

Let's get a KickStarter campaign up and running to buy the movie rights

Buy the rights from who? It's a true story so there are no rights to be sold.

[Richard Tugwell]

That's obviously Ctein's dad........

[John Ironside]

I'd like to second Walter Glover's recommendation for Simon Winchester's 'The Surgeon of Crowthorne' - a terrific read, retitled 'The Professor and the Madman' for our North American friends.
It encompasses the Civil War, insanity, slum-dwelling, a Victorian version of crowdsourcing, murder, charity and the crowning glory of lexicography. And it's based on a true story. No photography, though, that I can remember.

[John Williams]

I really enjoyed Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows but Brian Cleeg‘s The Man Who Stopped Time was harder to put down.