In 1860 he sustained a traumatic head injury while riding a stagecoach. By 1855 he had settled in San Francisco, selling art books. He was born in England in 1830 and emigrated to the United States around 1852. Muybridge’s biography is shot through with holes. an apt venue in which to regard Muybridge’s work. A combination art gallery and rare-book seller located in a formerly private home tucked away on Larchmont Boulevard, Michael Dawson is the oldest continuously operating bookstore in L.A. Those pictures captured a vestigial, untamed Wild West at a time when artists such as painter Albert Bierstadt and photographer Carleton Watkins were trying to tame it in their pristine landscapes.Ī small but judicious selection of Muybridge’s Yosemite pictures and motion studies are currently on display in Eadweard Muybridge: Landscape and Motion Studies, 1872-1855, an exhibit that runs through Nov. Solnit reclaims Muybridge as a key chronicler of a vanishing region, specifically in his revolutionary panoramas of a developing San Francisco and his haunting photos of Yosemite. He is thus one of the unsung figures in the development of modern-day California. What the author uncovered was a man - touched with intuitive genius, vain, intemperate, enamored of his moneyed patrons - whose developments in photography unleashed the energies of what would become the movie business.

“I had a hunch that there was something very interesting about him, and it turned out to be this fabulous story about the development of the West.” “My interest in time, speed and technology drew me to Muybridge,” Solnit says from her San Francisco home.

Eadweard muybridge rebecca solnit