The dark past of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge

A distinctive pattern of horizontal and vertical lines appears in the background of many of Eadweard Muybridge’s best-known photographs, giving his images of animal and human locomotion a strangely modern appearance, despite their being products of the 1880s. The lines also anticipate those adopted in the 20th century against which US criminals appear in police identification parades — which seems appropriate, given that a decade prior to taking these images, Muybridge himself was convicted of murder. Had the small-town jury not delivered a verdict of justifiable homicide — despite the fact that Muybridge deliberately sought out and gunned down his unarmed victim, and showed no remorse thereafter — then these images would never have existed.

He embarked on his quest to freeze-frame motion after accepting a challenge to prove that horses lifted all four feet off the ground when galloping, but a different sentence at his trial would have left him with both of his own feet in the air, courtesy of the public hangman.

The story of Eadweard Muybridge — or Edward Muggeridge, as he was originally known before adopting the archaic Old English spelling of his first name — has been explored at length in a fair number of biographies over the past 50 years.

This volume, however, shines the spotlight equally upon the chequered and much-travelled life of the photographer’s hitherto largely unknown victim, Major Harry Larkyns, previously relegated to a shadowy walk-on part in books about the photographer, as if his sole purpose had been to provide a convenient corpse. In fact, as Rebecca Gowers points out in her introduction: ‘Harry lived an extraordinary life, filled with radical changes of circumstance, including three or four stints behind bars, wild romances and knife-edge adventures.’

Historians can be forgiven for having until now concentrated on the world-famous photographic pioneer rather than an itinerant chancer such as Larkyns, teller of tall tales, whose claims to have lived a glamorous, often dangerous, life in Europe and India might simply have been the bar-room inventions of a gifted raconteur.