March-April 2020 “Muybridge accompanied General Henry Halleck on an early expedition to the scout the new land. During that trip, he captured photos of indigenous communities, the Russian orthodox communities and the untamed landscape. His stereoscopic pictures painted Alaska in a mysterious, exotic light that sparked worldwide interest.” ~Hank Davis for KTUU News, Feb., 2019
Eadweard Muybridge in Alaska In the summer of 1868, only a year after the purchase of Alaska from Russia and barely six months after the transfer ceremony was held in Sitka, reknowned photographer Eadweard Muybridge was hired to take photographs of the new land known as the Department of Alaska. In a direct Army commission, Muybridge was charged to “gather information about the commercial value and strategic usefulness of the territory.” He would conduct his photography during an expedition led by Major-General Henry W. Halleck, commander of the U.S. Military Division of the Pacific, who had been a prominent Union general in the Civil War, a pallbearer at President Lincoln’s funeral, and is credited as one of the people who gave Alaska— then known only as Russian America—its name. Eccentric and mysterious, Eadweard Muybridge was an English-American photographer who had nonetheless garnered widespread acclaim for his pioneering work in grand photographic studies of landscapes, and he would later become famous for his early work in motion-picture projection. His 1868 photographs taken at Fort Tongass, Fort Wrangle (later Wrangell), and Sitka were the first photographs of Alaska to be widely seen by the general public. Muybridge published 39 stereogram views of Southeast Alaska, that is, two side-by-side photographs taken simultaneously with a single camera, which, when seen through a viewing device called a stereoscope, merge into a single three-dimensional image. Think of the children’s version known as a Viewmaster, with its round cards of twin slideviews. This was cutting-edge technology in the 1860s, and Muybridge was an acknowledged master of the craft. He was born in the ancient town of Kingston-On-Thames, England, on April 9, 1830, to a coal merchant and his wife, John and Susan Muggeridge, and they named him Edward James Muggeridge. In 1852, at the age of 22, he emigrated to New York on the SS Liverpool to work as a publisher's agent, and began a bookselling partnership with a Mr. Bartlett. Three years later he
alaskan-history.com
!10
