He recruited athletes and local residents as models, and even borrowed animals from the Philadelphia Zoo. Muybridge was invited to continue this work at the University of Pennsylvania and between 18 he worked prolifically, creating sequential images with his multi-camera setup in his new outdoor studio. The news of this innovation was reported across the world-publishers could not yet reproduce high quality photographs, so magazines like Scientific American printed the images using wood engravings. On June 15th, 1878, the press was invited to witness Muybridge's early achievements in this area: using a bank of 12 cameras on a Palo Alto race track which (with shutters triggered by a tripwire) he could capture the movements of a galloping horse. Thus began Muybridge’s quest to develop high-speed photography that could capture “animal locomotion”. In 1872, the former governor of California, Leland Stanford, hired Eadweard Muybridge to make a photograph that would be the first of its kind: a picture capturing the gate of his racehorse Occident galloping at full speed. An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal MovementsĬommenced 1872 - Completed 1885 - Published 1887
