Financial means to control the means of one's artistic production - Book Report/Review Example

His most famous work includes Horse in motion and the Human body in motion. Muybridge was born in the UK but moved to San Francisco in the USA to pursue his photography career because he felt that there were more opportunities to be exploited in the USA and that he would find financiers for his work more readily in the USA than in his homeland in the UK. Although Muybridge was successful in his career, he suffered several misfortunes in his personal life. One of these was a head injury he sustained in a stagecoach accident while in the USA.

This forced him to travel back home to England for a few years before returning to the USA to continue pursuing his photography dream. At one point in his life, Muybridge was arrested and charged with homicide after he killed his wife’s lover, a general. He was however acquitted after the jury concluded that he had committed a justifiable homicide. Muybridge’s work required a lot of financial backing to buy his equipment and to carry around his work, a resource he did not necessarily have.

He thus turned to able people to invest in his works. His most important financier was Leland Stanford, a former governor of California, a local businessman and founder of a university in his home area. The financial relationship between Muybridge and Stanford started when Stanford commissioned the photographer to answer an enquiry at that time that had divided people in the area. Stanford was of the opinion that a horse, at some point during galloping, had all four legs off the ground. Muybridge took on the challenge and went to work to see best how he would do this.

He set up 24 different cameras parallel to the horse track over a length of 24 feet. The shutters of the cameras were connected to trip wires on the track, which would be triggered by the horse’s hoofs as it galloped through. In this way, Muybridge was able to capture the motion of the horse up to a tiny fraction of a second. The result was the famous Horse in Motion series of photographs by Edweard Muybridge. Furthermore, Stanford was proven right, that horses could ‘fly’, with its legs tucked underneath it as it galloped, thus started a financial relationship between the two, which, unfortunately, did not end well for the photographer.

Stanford published a book on the motion of a horse using drawn copies of Muybridge’s photos of the Horse in Motion, without giving any due credit to Muybridge himself for the crucial part he played in answering his question or taking the momentous photographs. Muybridge needed a financier, hence Leland Stanford, in order to continue doing what he loved most, taking great photographs. Furthermore, his talent led him to take unique photos of people and animals in motion that immortalized time.

Although Muybridge has freedom to do the things he wants to, sometimes he has to do his financier’s bidding, just like what happens with sponsoring parties who always have their agenda to push through in order to give their support. Most of the time this gives the artists being sponsored a dilemma because they have to choose what they want to do and the sponsor’s bidding, especially if the sponsors’ bidding is at cross paths with theirs. Most artists usually choose the latter because they feel like they cannot go far without financial support from their sponsors, who were difficult to get in the first place and had to be given sufficient reasons to join in.

However, other artists view their art and freedom as being too