Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904, pronounced Edward My-bridge) was a British photographer who is best known for his stop-motion photography. Before that made him famous, however, Muybridge traveled throughout the western United States for nearly a decade, a Forrest Gump of photography, photographing Native Americans, the Yosemite Valley, the construction of the Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads, the last Indian war between the U.S. Army and the Modoc Indians, as well as scenes in California gold mining country, Alaska, and Central America. Many of these images would later be published as stereoviews or magic lantern slides.

In 1878, Muybridge, working in Palo Alto, California, with the aid of 50 cameras equipped with shutters with electrically operated triggers, captured the incredible with photography – at a full gallop, all four of a horse’s feet leave the ground at the same time for a fraction of a moment.

Muybridge took other photographs in 1878, but their importance would not be known until after his death. During his time in California in the spring of 1878, he took numerous high-quality panoramic photographs of San Francisco, both from the hills and the streets, mostly in an attempt to replace photographs he had taken the previous year that had been damaged in a fire. Of course, when the 1906 earthquake and fire hit, the city would be dramatically altered and Muybridge’s images are some of the best that illustrate how the city looked in earlier years.

By 1883, Muybridge was at work with stop-motion photography on a regular basis, in part with the encouragement of Thomas Eakins, who felt that capturing the human form in a range of motion could be invaluable to those studying the human form. Muybridge photographed animals, both domestic and zoo animals, and humans, in a variety of movements and with upgraded equipment. Throughout his life, Muybridge would continue experimenting with his stop-motion images and would even develop a mechanism for reanimating them. While his zoopraxiscope never gained wide popularity, it was among the first moving picture inventions.

Four years later, Muybridge would publish his 11-volume masterpiece, Animal Locomotion, which had 781 large folio collotype images. Sales were slow in the period, but today a single page from the work will sell for $600 to $1,600. Muybridge would publish two more volumes after he returned to his birthplace, Kingston Upon Thames, with Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901), both abridged versions of Animal Locomotion. An additional publication, The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography, was promoted by Leland Stanford, the California governor who had supported Muybridge’s work in Palo Alto, but Muybridge himself was not involved with the book.

Timothy O’Sullivan immigrated to New York City from Ireland with his parents when he was a small child and it was there that he later found work in Mathew Brady’s photography studio. (Brady, who was afflicted with vision problems that struck when he was still a young man, depended heavily on the talent he found in recruits like O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner.) While O’Sullivan appears to have said he was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Civil War, this does not seem to be confirmed in the records, but he was photographing during the war and by 1862 was certainly working for Mathew Brady as part of Brady’s crew of field photographers.

O’Sullivan spent much of 1862 in northern Virginia and would eventually begin working with Alexander Gardner, who had left Brady to work on his own. Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866) would include 44 of O’Sullivan’s photographs, including perhaps his best known image, one of the many he took of the Gettysburg Battlefield, called “The Harvest of Death,” a view of a field somehow chilling in its prosaicism, the idea that it could be any field, anywhere, spread with bodies in all directions as far as the camera’s eye can see. He would also photograph other important events like the sieges of Petersburg and Fort Fisher and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

While O’Sullivan is perhaps best known for his Civil War work, some of his most magnificent work would be done as an expedition photographer. He traveled with the U.S. Geological Exploration of the 40^th Parallel (1867 to 1869), recording the landscape across the frontier. While the official goal was to produce images that would inspire settlers to head west, O’Sullivan also took beautiful images of Native American Indians, their occupations and villages, as well as some of the prehistoric ruins through the Southwest. He would also work with one of the first crews to survey the Panamanian Isthmus for a canal before returning to the American West with the Wheeler Expedition (1871 to 1874). (The trip faced a number of calamities, including the loss of supplies and several boats, which also meant the loss of a number of O’Sullivan’s images.) He would be retained by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Treasury Department as an official photographer upon his return to Washington, but would die in 1882 at just 42 from tuberculosis.

O’Sullivan’s photographs are highly collectible, with, as with all photography, condition and subject matter playing a significant role. Albumen images from the Civil War can bring in excess of $1,000 at auction, while collections of the stereoview photographs taken on the Wheeler Expedition can fetch considerably more.