970
Muybridge produced 781 motion studies under the par-
tial supervision of Thomas Eakins, which he published
in 1887 under the title Animal Locomotion. It became
Muybridge’s best-known work. The plates in Animal
Locomotion were printed using the collotype photome-
chanical technique, although a nearly complete set of
cyanotype proofs for the project is currently held at the
Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American
History. Whereas in California Muybridge used trip
wires to activate his shutters, in Pennsylvania he used a
timer mechanism. This permitted him to photograph be-
haviours in which the subject does not proceed straight
ahead at a constant rate. His equipment was markedly
better than it had been in California. Equipped with
thirty cameras which could be directed simultaneously
at different angles, he was also able to take advantage
of gelatine dry-plate chemistry, which was both faster
and more convenient than the wet-plate materials used
earlier. Although Animal Locomotion contains further
photographs of horses and other animals borrowed
from the Philadelphia Zoo, the primary focus was on
humans. Men and women, nude or partially clad, are
shown engaged in activities ranging from the banal to
the highly esoteric: walking, running, and jumping are
interspersed with dancing, smoking, and women pouring
water over each others’ heads. Of special interest are
images made of people with physiological disorders,
including an amputee, a pathologically obese woman,
and a girl with multiple sclerosis. These photographs
presage the diagnostic role photography would assume
in scientifi c investigations, particularly under the in-
fl uence of Etienne-Jules Marey and his colleagues in
France. The volume was also highly infl uential among
artists: subscribers to Animal Locomotion included the
painters Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Ernest Meissonier,
John Everett Millais, William Bouguereau, August
Rodin, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
After Animal Locomotion Muybridge retired from
photography and focused instead on lecturing and writ-
ing about his work. In 1893 he staged a zoopraxiscope
theatre show at the World’s Columbian Exposition in
Chicago. It closed early due to tepid interest.
Phillip Prodger
See also: Instantaneous Photography; Brady, Mathew
B.; Morse, Samuel Finley Breese; Watkins, Carleton
Eugene; Wet Collodion Negative; Dallmeyer, John
Henry & Thomas Ross; Eakins, Thomas; Collotype;
Cyanotype; and Marey, Etienne Jules.
Further Reading
Coe, Brian, Muybridge & the Chronophotographers, London:
Museum of the Moving Image, 1992.
Gordon, Sarah, “Prestige, Professionalism, and the Paradox of
Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion Nudes,” Penn-
sylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. XXXX,
no. 1, January 2006, 79–104.
Haas, Robert Bartlett, Muybridge: Man in Motion, Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 1976.
Harris, D. (ed.), Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic
Panorama of San Francisco, 1850–1880, Montreal: Canadian
Center for Architecture, MTI Press, 1993.
Hendricks, Gordon, Eadweard Muybridge the Father of the Mo-
tion Picture, London: Secker and Warburg, 1975.
Mozley, Anita Ventura (ed.), Eadweard Muybridge: the Stanford
Years, Stanford: Stanford University Museum of Art, 1972.
Palmquist, Peter, “Imagemakers of the Modoc War: Louis Heller
and Eadweard Muybridge,” Journal of the Shaw Historical
Library 8 (1994).
Prodger, Phillip, Prodger, Phillip, “How Did Muybridge Do It?,”
Aperture, no. 158; ‘Time,’ Spring 2000: 12–16.
——, “The Romance and Reality of the Horse in Motion.” In
Marey/Muybridge, pionniers du cinéma, edited by Joyce
Delimate, 44–71, Beaune/Stanford, Beaune: Conseil régional
de Bourgogne, 1996.
——, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Pho-
tography Movement, New York: Oxford University Press,
2003.
Solnit, Rebecca, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the
Technological Wild West, New York: Viking, 2003.MYERS, EVELEEN (1856–1937)
English photographer
Eveleen Myers, née Tennant, was born in 1856 to Charles
Tennant, an M.P. of Cadoxton, Glamorganshire, Wales,
and his wife Gertrude, née Collier. In London, the Ten-
nants were part of prominent artistic and literary circles.
In 1880, Myers married F.W.H. Myers (1843–1901),
psychical researcher and co-founding member of the
Society for Psychical Research as well as writer and
inspector of schools in Cambridge. The couple lived in
Cambridge and had three children. Myers fi rst began
photographing to take portraits of her children in 1888,
and she practiced photography, working in platinum, in
the late 1880s through the early twentieth century. Her
work consists of portraiture, artistic studies, and allegori-
cal works. She photographed notable men and women,
including Robert Browning and William Ewart Glad-
stone. These two portraits, along with Rebekah at the Well
and The Summer Garden, are probably her best-known
works and were reproduced in Sun Artists, Number 7,
April 1891. Myers’s photographs are in the collections
of, among others, the National Portrait Gallery, London,
and the Getty Museum. She died in 1937.
Diane Waggoner