In the dead of night in 1875, just after being acquitted for the murder of his wife's lover, Eadweard Muybridge boarded the Pacific Mail Steamship Company's vessel The Honduras. He temporarily took on the name Eduardo Santiago Muybridge and spent a year photographing all along the Central American Pacific Coast with particular emphasis given to his travels in Guatemala and Panamá.
Upon his return to California in 1876 he produced and published a very limited number of albums that he sold or gave away. The albums – eleven known to date - are exceedingly rare and each is unique in size and scope. They are a complicated record of the past from an enigmatic and important figure.
But they're a complicated record not just because of the varied makeup of each album; Muybridge was exceptionally adept at combining different negatives to form single composite images. That means that the exact same landscape view might appear in different albums with completely different skies and clouds! Or the exact same clouds might appear in dozens of different landscape scenes! And some landscapes might even have had volcanoes added or subtracted from the scene.
Starting in 2007, Dr. Scott Brady (a cultural geographer and colleague at Chico State) and I traveled to Guatemala and Panamá to relocate and rephotograph a substantial portion of Muybridge's photographs. I also compiled a catalog of every known Muybridge Central American picture, complete with a detailed visual analysis of all the wacky things he did with clouds and volcanoes.
We've completed our fieldwork and are actively working on a book manuscript of our discoveries and experiences.
