Eadweard Muybridge's extraordinary personal story has all the ingredients of drama. He was born in the English suburbs, and set out to seek adventure and fortune in the American Wild West. While visiting Europe his coach overturned, and he was treated for a fractured skull. It was at this time that photography grew. Muybridge became a pioneering innovator, who not only invented new methods of photography, but devised 'a flying studio' which enabled him to develop his pictures in the field.

He was betrayed by his wife, and risked everything by killing her lover. Muybridge's work is iconic, the picture of the moving horse, which proved how it lifted its four feet off the ground simultaneously, known throughout the world. His distinctive stop-motion pictures of men, women, boxers, wrestlers, racehorses, elephants and camels frozen in time, captured in the act of moving, fighting, galloping, living, have become some of the most famous images in the history of photography and science.