Coming home: Eadweard Muybridge's return to Kingston

The photographic and moving-image innovator Eadweard Muybridge was one of Kingston's most celebrated and eccentric residents, spending the first 20 and final 10 years of his life there, with the intervening 44 years spent mainly in the USA. This discussion will focus on Muybridge's relationship with Kingston and the range of places he lived after returning to the town in 1894 following his disastrous participation as an exhibitor at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. He lived in a succession of Kingston homes, from a room in a riverside boarding-house ('The Chestnuts') to a large, detached house alongside Kingston's entrance to Richmond Park. He remained very active, using Kingston as his travelling base for an extensive projection tour of his work across the UK's civic halls and arts clubs, and assembling an immense scrapbook of his life's work, intended for future researchers. But much of his time in Kingston remains mysterious (Why did he tell his Kingston-based relatives he had returned there from Japan rather than, as was really the case, from New York? Was he really digging a swimming pool in his back garden at the moment of his death?). The Kingston Museum's Muybridge Collection curator Seoyoung Kim and Kingston University film historian Stephen Barber will try to unravel a few of Muybridge's Kingston enigmas.