Exposing Muybridge

Brilliant, ambitious, and mischievous, the 19th-century San Francisco photographer Eadweard Muybridge lived the lives of a dozen men before his breakthrough photographs of running horses set the course for the development of cinema and transformed the camera into a machine of unmatched perception and persuasion. But hiding in Muybridge's work are clues that provoke an enduring question: Can we believe what we see in a photograph?

Few figures have played so seminal a role in our moving picture storytelling culture as the revolutionary 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. At the behest of his patron, the railroad baron and former California Governor Leland Stanford, Muybridge produced unprecedented images of running horses, instantly transforming the camera into a machine of unmatched powers of perception and persuasion, and setting the course for the development of cinema.

Before his motion photography breakthrough, Muybridge produced one of the most celebrated early landscape catalogues of the American West. He made the first photographs of winemaking in Northern California, produced the first photographs of native Tlingit people and of Southeast Alaska, was the fourth to photograph Yosemite, the first to be hired by the U.S. government to photograph an Indian War (The Modoc War in Northern California), and his photographs of Central America are widely considered the most important early images of the region.

Mischievous, resilient, deceitful, proud — Muybridge was a complicated man, and his personal story is as melodramatic as his professional one is distinguished, imbued with ambition and success, loss and betrayal, even the cold-blooded killing of a romantic rival.

“The machine cannot lie,” Leland Stanford declared of Muybridge’s horse-in-motion images. But what about the photographer?

Exposing Muybridge reveals long-buried secrets hiding in Muybridge’s photographs that force us to ask, can we truly believe what we see in a photograph?

Far from a relic of the past, then, Muybridge marks a beginning of “now,” his work a catalyst for our modern machine-made visual storytelling culture, and an inspiration to cutting-edge artists, scientists, and innovators, people who continue to reshape how we interpret and experience our world.

“FASCINATING… Director Marc Shaffer unfolds a (rich) story with this cinematic biography.” The Guardian

“Marc Shaffer … has crafted something EXQUISITE. Brilliantly and beautifully edited.” FILMINK

“Shows the enduring FASCINATION of (Muybridge’s) work.” The New York Times

“Tremendously ENTERTAINING.” San Francisco Chronicle
 
“TERRIFIC… the perfect movie for anyone whose interest was piqued by “Nope” to learn “the real story.” Movie Nation

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