About —
Produced by the Musée d’art de Joliette, this exhibition brings together 12 sequences of photographs of humans and animals in motion by the Britishborn American artist Eadweard Muybridge, an important figure in the history of 19th-century photography, known primarily for his photographic analyses of movement.
These 12 collatypes from the Musée d’art de Joliette’s collection date from 1887 and are prints from the impressive series of 781 original plates assembled by Muybridge under the title Animal Locomotion.These photographic studies are still useful to artists and physiologists interested in the details of posture and the movement of bodies in action. Muybridge’s work on the elements of movement places him among the precursors of cinema.The registrar of the Musée d’art de Joliette, Lynda Corcoran, curates this exhibition.
Biography —
Born in Kingston-on-Thames, England, in 1830, Eadweard Muybridge emigrated to the United States in 1851 and settled in San Francisco, where he worked as an editor. After a serious stagecoach accident in 1860, he returned to England for five years to study photography. Upon returning to San Francisco he worked with the Coast and Geodetic Survey as a landscape photographer and became popular in California society for his ingenuity and the quality of his work. He died in 1904 in England, leaving the entirety of his work to the Library of Kingston-on-Thames.