The lists below provide selected research resources on Muybridge’s life and work.
Institutions That House Muybridge’s Work
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, USA
National Museum of American History, USA
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, USA
Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA
Stanford University Libraries, USA
The Society of California Pioneers, USA
University of Pennsylvania, University Archives & Records Center, USA
Online Resources
Stephen Herbert, a renowned visual media historian and Muybridge scholar, spent many years meticulously researching Muybridge’s chronology and compiling a range of matters related to Muybridge’s life and work. He created a comprehensive website, The Compleat Muybridge. Herbert’s blog site, Muy Blog, also offers insightful information and many anecdotes on Muybridge.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts holds a complete set of Animal Locomotion (1887). All 781 collotypes have been digitised and made available online.
Stanford University Libraries hold rare copies of Muybridge’s important publications. They are digitised and available online: The Pacific coast of Central America and Mexico; the Isthmus of Panama; Guatemala; and the cultivation and shipment of coffee (1876) and The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881).
The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, houses one of the most extensive collections of Muybridge’s landscape images, the Lone Mountain College Collection, which contains over 1,700 stereographs.
In 2010, Kingston Museum and Kingston University jointly created a website, Eadweard Muybridge: Defining Modernities, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Illustrated with images from the Kingston Museum’s collection, it provides extensive resources on Muybridge. The site is divided into four main sections: Collection Map and Database, Muybridge: Image and Context, Comparative Timelines, and Bibliography. Although some elements need updating, the website continues to provide vital information for Muybridge researchers.
Books and Articles
Adam, H. C. (ed.) (2014). Eadweard Muybridge: the human and animal locomotion photographs. Cologne: Taschen.
Ball, E. (2013). The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures. New York: Anchor Books.
Barber, S. (2012). Muybridge: the eye in motion. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Barber, S. (2020). The Projectionists: Eadweard Muybridge and the Future Projections of the Moving Image. Zurich: Diaphanes.
Braun, M. (2010). Eadweard Muybridge. London: Reaktion.
Braun, M. (1984). ‘Muybridge’s scientific fictions’. Studies in Visual Communication, 10 (3), pp. 2–21.
Brookman, P. (ed.) (2010). Eadweard Muybridge. London: Tate Publishing.
Brown, J. (1994). Contesting images: photography and the World’s Columbian Exposition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Bullough, W.A. (1989). ‘Eadweard Muybridge and the Old San Francisco Mint: Archival Photographs as Historical Documents’. California History, 68 (1/2), pp. 2–13.
Burns, E.B. (1986). Eadweard Muybridge in Guatemala, 1875: the photographer as social recorder. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Butters, S. (2005). Kingston Museum 1904 – 2004: An ever increasing service and delight. Intypelibra Ltd: London.
Butters, S. (2013). “That famous place”: a history of Kingston upon Thames. Kingston: Kingston University Press.
Carter, B. (1913). ‘The genesis of the moving image’. The Bioscope, 18 (336), pp. 845-849.
Coe, B. (ed.) (1992). Muybridge and the chronophotographers. London: Museum of the Moving Image.
Chisholm, B. (2016). ‘Muybridge in Minnesota’, Film Studies Faculty Working Papers, 1, pp. 1-24.
Cook, P. & Reynolds, A. (eds.) (2011). Muybridge revolutions: Muybridge in Kingston. Kingston upon Thames: Kingston Museum.
Cresswell, T. & Ott, J. (2022). Muybridge and Mobility. Oakland: University of California Press.
D’Addario, D. (2013). ‘Eadweard Muybridge: grandfather of the GIF‘, New Republic, New York, 4 February 2013.
Daigle, A. (2017). ‘Not a betting man: Stanford, Muybridge, and the Palo Alto Wager Myth’. Film History, 29 (4), pp. 112–130.
Frampton, H. (1973). ‘Fragments of a tesseract ’ Reprint, Circles of confusion: film, photography, video, texts, 1965-1980. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983.
Fresko, D. (2013). ‘Muybridge’s Magic Lantern’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 8 (1), pp. 47–64.
Gordon, S. (2006). ‘Prestige, professionalism, and the paradox of Eadweard Muybridge’s animal locomotion nudes’, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130 (1), pp. 79–104.
Gordon, S. (2015). Indecent Exposures: Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘Animal Locomotion’ nudes. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gowers, R. (2019). The scoundrel Harry Larkyns and his pitiless killing by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Haas, R.B. (1976). Muybridge: Man in motion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Harris, D. and Sandweiss, E. (1993). Eadweard Muybridge and the photographic panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Hendricks, G. (1975). Eadweard Muybridge: the father of the motion picture. New York: Grossman Publishers.
Herbert, S. (ed.) (2004). Eadweard Muybridge: the Kingston Museum bequest. Hastings: The Projection Box.
Herbert, S. (2014). Muy blog: Eadweard Muybridge selection 2009-2012. Hastings: The Projection Box.
Hill, P. (2001). Eadweard Muybridge, 55. London: Phaidon.
Hood, M. & Haas, R. (1963). ‘Eadweard Muybridge’s Yosemite Valley Photographs, 1867-1872’. California Historical Society Quarterly, 42(1), pp. 5-26.
Johnson, M. L. (2011). ‘Exhibition Review: Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change’. Early Popular Visual Culture, 9 (2), pp. 159-161.
Kingston Museum. (2010). Muybridge in Kingston. [Brochure]. Kingston upon Thames: Kingston Museum.
Latsis, D. (2015). ‘Landscape in Motion: Muybridge and the Origins of Chronophotography’. Film History, 27 (3), pp. 1-40.
Leslie, E. (2013). ‘Loops and joins: Muybridge and the optics of animation’. Early Popular Visual Culture, 11 (1).
Long, C. (1999). ‘The Muybridge/Animal Locomotion Collection at The National Museum of American History’. Topics in Photographic Preservation, 8, pp. 1-10.
MacDonnell, K. (1972). Eadweard Muybridge: the man who invented the moving picture. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Mozley, A.V., Haas, R.B. & Forster-Hahn, F. (1972). Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford years, 1872-1882. Palo Alto: Stanford University Museum of Art.
Muybridge, E. (1887). Animal Locomotion: Prospectus and Catalogue of Plates. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company.
Muybridge, E. (1893). Descriptive Zoopraxography or the science of Animal Locomotion made popular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
Muybridge, E. (1899). Animals in motion. Reprint. New York: Dover Publications, 1957.
Muybridge, E. (1901). The Human Figure in Motion. Reprint. New York: Dover Publications, 1955.
Muybridge, E. (1979). Muybridge’s complete human and animal locomotion, Vol. 1-3: all 781 plates from the 1887 Animal locomotion. New York: Dover Publications.
Newhall, B. (1950). ‘The George E. Nitzsche Collection of Muybridge Relics.’ Medical Radiography, pp. 24-26.
Pepper, W. et al. (1888). The Muybridge Work at the University of Pennsylvania: The Method and The Result. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
Prodger, P. (2003). Time stands still: Muybridge and the instantaneous photography movement. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pytel, M. (2013). ‘Eadweard Muybridge: inverted modernism and the stereoscopic vision’. Early Popular Visual Culture, 11 (1).
Rau. W. H. (1883). ‘Mr. Muybridge’s lecture with the Zoopraxiscope’. Philadelphia Photographer, 20 (231).
Shimamura, A.P. (2002). ‘Muybridge in motion: Travels in art, psychology and neurology’, History of Photography 26 (4), pp. 341–350.
Solnit, R. (2003). River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. London: Penguin Books.
Winger, R. (2007). Muybridge’s horse: a poem in three phases. Gibsons, B.C.: Nightwood Editions.
Wolfe, B. & Brady, S. (2017). Phantom skies and shifting ground: landscape, culture, and rephotography in Eadweard Muybridge’s illustrations of Central America. Santa Fe: Radius Books.