Edweard Muybridge is quite the character. In honor of the 182nd anniversary of his birth, Google put up a Doodle that animates his famous series of pictures proving that racing horses do, in fact, lift all their legs up at once.
This is what he's best known for -- serial photography that is now thought of as essentially the predecessor to film. But it's weird that he's still famous for his photography even though he killed another man in cold blood.
Such a story inspired Philip Glass to produce an opera called The Photographer (1982).
But what always interested me (obviously) are his body studies. He made people strip nude and move in certain ways so that he could record how the body looked in motion.
Muybridge, Woman Walking Down Stairs, 1887.
And Muybridge was also [according to some] the inspiration for one of the coolest paintings ever, Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending Staircase, N0. 2, 1912.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending Staircase, No. 2, 1912. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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