Who was Eadweard Muybridge? "Father of motion pictures?" He was one of them, sure. Self-promoting inventor of the Zoopraxiscope, which was hardly an improvement upon prior combinations of the magic lantern and phenakistiscope--sure, he was that, too. English expatriate photographically exploring the American frontier, indeed. Guy who changed his name several times as part of his attempts to create a mystique about himself, which he mostly pulled off because of his magnificent beard--yes. Muybridge, however, was also a killer. And not only because he gunned down Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover and possibly their son's father, for which Muybridge was tried and declared not guilty on the grounds of justifiable homicide--the Wild West jury essentially legalizing murderous jealousy--but also in a figurative sense.Before that fatal incident in 1874 Muybridge had mostly been a landscape photographer, including of Yosemite and creating a panorama view of San Francisco. It was this that brought him to the attention of robber baron Leland Stanford and his horses. It was the beginning of a career in which Muybridge would obsessively shoot (photographically, that is) just about every living thing he came across. It was a slaughter of humanity and the animal kingdom brought before his batteries of firing cameras. Like a taxidermist, he would, then, arrange these corpses into books and, perhaps, use them as models for the painted discs rotating to create animations for his Zoopraxiscope le