"I am going to make a name for myself," young Eadweard Muybridge told a friend. "If I fail, you will never hear of me again." His series became the basis for motion picture photography, and today the man should be as celebrated as Thomas Edison, to whom he was once compared. But Muybridge's pioneering works fell between the stools of still photography and cinema, and at the time of his death, in 1904, he was all but forgotten. Even the contemporary fascination with photography has not elevated Muybridge to his proper place. These volumes may redress the balance. With the exactitude of a scientist and the dramatic sense of a stage designer, Muybridge observed lions, donkeys, dogs, deer, even elephants as they strode and ran. Their movements, caught in chiaroscuro, give the studies an eerie, dreamlike quality that has never quite been duplicated. Other series of nude men, women and children are done without a hint of prurience and provide a brilliant study of anatomy. The price tag on this rediscovered classic is prohibitive, but no library can afford to skip works that prove photography was a high art long before the electronic-shutter and autofocus robots that now pass for cameras.

TIME Monday, Feb. 04, 1980. Copyright © 2009