Born in England, Muybridge was employed by the London Printing and Publishing Co. and went to the U.S. in 1852 as their representative. In San Francisco he learned photography from daguerreotypist Silas Selleck in the early 1860s, and worked for Carleton E. Watkins, the major West Coast scenic photographer, before striking out on his own. He made photographic surveys for the firm of Thomas Houseworth and worked for the U.S. War Department documenting areas of the West Coast.

Muybridge first gained recognition in 1867 for a prize-winning series of dramatic Yosemite views. The following year, he was the official photographer with the American military presence in recently-purchased Alaska. He took over 2000 photographs of the American Far West between 1868 and 1873.

In the early summer of 1878, Muybridge climbed to the roof of the Mark Hopkins mansion on Nob Hill, the site of today’s Mark Hopkins Hotel. It was a remarkably clear and calm day — a good thing for Muybridge since gusty winds would have played havoc with his oversized glass plate camera and blurred the long exposures it required.

Pointing his camera first toward the southwest, Muybridge made his first exposure, then 12 more at intervals of 15 to 30 minutes. It was a laborious process. Each of his glass plates, approximately 18” x 23”, was coated with emulsion and sensitized with silver nitrate, then immediately exposed and developed in a portable, rooftop darkroom.

Thirteen overlapping images provided the material for stitching the images into a seamless panorama. The long exposure time accurately captured buildings and ships in the bay, but not the people and carriages moving about. Thus, the eerie ghost town appearance of a city that was actually teeming with action.

The result was a splendid 360° view, 16” in height and more than 17 feet in length. A consummate self-promoter, Muybridge gave prints of his work in fan-fold book format to numerous movers and shakers in San Fransicso society.

San Francisco 1878

A 75-foot wide enlargement of his panorama can be seen today in the penthouse of the Wells Fargo Bank headquarters in San Francisco.

One of the most interesting features of this image is the "spite fence" which is in the far left panel, below you can see an enlarged section. It was constructed by Charles Crocker, a banker who owned the ornate Italianate mansion on the same large city block. Nicholas Yung, a partner in a funeral home, owned the house concealed by the fence, he refused to sell his lot to Crocker and give him sole possession of one of the most desireable blocks of land in the city. The fence was fourty feet high and blocked out three sides of Yung's house, he eventually sold out to Crocker and moved his house to another lot.

the spite fence is centre right, between the two mansions

Eadweard Muybridge was the most significant contributor to the early study of human and animal locomotion. His extensive studies and inventions were acknowledged by such pioneers of motion pictures as E. J. Marey, the Lumiere brothers, and Thomas Edison.

In 1872 Muybridge was enlisted by Leland Stanford to settle a wager regarding the position of a trotting horse's legs. Using the fastest shutter available, Muybridge was able to provide only the faintest image. He was more successful five years later when, employing a battery of cameras with mechanically tripped shutters, he showed clearly the stages of the horse's movement: at top speed, a trotting horse had all four hooves off the ground simultaneously, and in a different configuration from that of a galloping horse.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Text from The Encyclopedia of Photography (1984)