Photographer Eadweard Muybridge's early life was filled with the events of Victorian melodrama: adultery, jealousy, betrayal, murder, and an abandoned child. Tried for the murder of his wife's lover, he was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide.
Later in his life, Muybridge's sequences of still photos signify a person committed to the emerging culture of modern science. But taken together, they seem to say something else--to construct a narrative that has shaped our culture into one where observations through the filter of technology are trusted more than those coming directly through our physical senses, and set images into motion in the service of a public manipulation of perception as effectively as Muybridge himself used them in the revision of his own private mythology.