Much of contemporary visual culture can be traced directly to the work of Eadweard Muybridge, photographer and film pioneer. In this book, the author analyses Muybridge's prodigious output principally through the photographer's own scrapbook, a multidimensional and unprecedented "memory book" that was created in the final years of his life.

Much of contemporary visual culture can be traced directly to the work of Eadweard Muybridge, photographer and film pioneer. His work is powered by an extreme obsessionality, excess and ordinariness that enabled him to negate all preconceptions and to re-conceptualize the dynamics of corporeal and urban forms. He created a moving-image projector, the Zoopraxiscope, for his sequences of human and animal movement, thus construction the first identifiably cinematic space for his images' projection to spectators--Edited summary from back cover.