Exposing Muybridge

About the movie

Exposing Muybridge tells the story of trailblazing 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who changed the world with his camera. Muybridge set the course for the development of cinema when he became the first photographer to capture something moving faster than the human eye can see--Leland Stanford's galloping horses. He also produced a sprawling and spectacular landscape catalog, ranging from Alaska to Central America, Utah to California. Artful, resilient, selfish, naive, eccentric, deceitful--Muybridge is a complicated, imperfect man and his story drips with ambition and success, loss and betrayal, near death experiences and even murder. "The machine cannot lie," Stanford declared of Muybridge's pioneering motion images. But what about the photographer? More than a century after his death, Muybridge's photographs have never ceased to seduce cutting-edge artists, scientists, innovators, and general viewers alike.—Marc Shaffer