This summer, 128 years after he was driven out of London in humiliation, Kingston upon Thames's most prodigal son and San Francisco's most extraordinary photographer gets his due with a big show of his photographs at Tate Britain. History has yet to settle the verdict on this brilliant photographer whose work laid the foundation for motion pictures. Even in this belated moment of triumph, Eadweard Muybridge's authorship is yet again being called into question for the third time since his series of landmark achievements.  Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston, in 1830, the year the first passenger railway ran, at the start of the decade that ended with the introduction of photography, the medium in which he would achieve wonders. He told his grandmother as he prepared to emigrate to America and turned down her pile of sovereigns, "No, thank you Grandma, I'm going to make a name for myself. If I fail, you will never hear of me again."  He did make a name for himself, though perhaps too late for her – several names, in fact, since he changed his name to Muygridge about when he arrived in San Francisco in 1855 to begin a brief, successful career as a bookseller. Five years later, he was headed east when the horses pulling his stagecoach stampeded, resulting in a head injury so serious that it may have transformed his personality, and certainly required a long convalescence. That was his first return to his homeland, and he stayed until 1866 or 1867, skipping the American civil war and tinkering with various inventions. Somewhere along the way he learned photography, because in 1867 he returned to San Francisco as an accomplished photographer named Muybridge. (His other name change, of Edward to the Anglo-Saxon Eadweard, came later and may have been after the coronation stone in his hometown that is inscribed with the names of two King Eadweards.)  The photographer Muybridge began with a series of images of Yosemite, the dramatic valley of waterfalls, sheer cliffs, and picturesque groves in the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada, and went on to photograph his city, the surrounding countryside, mansions and their occupants, lighthouses of the Pacific coast, military installations, the Modoc Indian war, and more. He compiled a huge catalogue of images while roaming the west coast from Alaska to Panama and exploring the possibilities of photography.  He was restless with the medium's limitations, in 1869 patenting a camera sky shade so that he could expose his film separately for the sky and the subject below (film in that era was so sensitive to blue light it routinely overexposed skies into blank whiteness). He added clouds and even the moon to many early landscapes, using the darkroom equivalent of Photoshop to doctor them. His images were themselves restless, seeking the chaotic, the startling, the moody, and the unsettling in his most personal work, the landscapes.  And then, in 1872, his primarily scenic work took a detour, thanks to the curiosity of a railroad baron. The millionaire Leland Stanford took up racehorses as a pastime. He also took up the debate about whether all four feet of a trotting horse are ever off the ground at the same time and looked for a novel way to solve the question. He commissioned Muybridge to photograph Occident, one of his champion trotters, in motion.  Photography in that era was slow – slower than the world around it. It might be faster than drawing and painting, but it was hardly instantaneous: landscape photographers looked for still mornings in which no breeze disturbed trees and water; portrait photographers used iron neck braces to keep their subjects still, and the children often blurred anyway as they fidgeted during slow exposures. Muybridge had to try to make a photograph that captured not just motion but incredibly rapid motion, and though he succeeded well enough for Stanford's initial purposes (yes, the horse did have all four feet off the ground), his images were rough silhouettes. There was a little fanfare, and the project slipped into the background.  Muybridge was then one of the two great landscape photographers of the west coast, the other being Carleton Watkins, and while Watkins was a classicist, making serene, stately pictures of a still, eternal world of beauty, Muybridge was a romantic who sought out the uncanny, the unsettling, the uncertain, notably in his mammoth-plate photographs of Yosemite in 1872, the same year he photographed Stanford's trotter.  In 1877, after Muybridge made some technological breakthroughs in photographic chemistry that still remain murky, his work with Stanford resumed. Stanford supplied the money and the horses; Muybridge supplied the direction and the technical skill, though he sought out the Central Pacific Railroad's engineers and technicians to help him develop new high-speed mechanical camera shutters. Cameras before then rarely had shutters. You just took the lens cap off by hand and put it back on after a few seconds or minutes. But Muybridge was heading toward the (pre-digital) modern camera, the one with sensitive film and some means of triggering the shutters to make exposures in hundredths of seconds. With these breakthroughs he began to photograph horses again.  The result was an extraordinary series of images. He made multiple exposures in quick succession and printed them together as grids. The real subject was not the object but the motion, not the noun but the verb: trotting, running, walking, leaping. He photographed men as well as horses, including himself nude, swinging a pick, a tall, morose man whose muscles made him look younger and hair made him look older than his age of half a century. The motion studies would eventually show men, women and children, along with animals ranging from elk to an ostrich and a lot more horses.  He created another strange device which, with his talent for naming things awkwardly (starting with himself), he called the zoopraxiscope. It was the ancestor of the motion-picture projector: it broadcast those images of creatures in motion as a fast-moving series that appeared to be, rather than many successive images, one image that moved. He began to show enthusiastic audiences these flickering short movies of actions, and some consider this to be the birth of cinema.  For Stanford, who had a stableful of spectacular racehorses, the project was always about horses – he saw it as useful for understanding their anatomy, movement, and plotting their training, and little more. For Muybridge it was about photography and more – about possibilities that had not been named. Physiologists, photographers, scientists of all sorts, and painters were excited by his breakthroughs. He took his zoopraxiscope and photographs abroad.  In Paris he was befriended by the great physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, who would abandon his other methods and focus on photography as the best means to investigate motion. Painters were both thrilled and dismayed that a horse in motion was so little like the images of rocking-horse gallopers they had been painting for ever, and the very idea of painterly accuracy began to disintegrate. Did you paint what the world looked like to the slow human eye or the high-speed camera? Paris was enthralled. Muybridge was at the height of his career.  And then came London. On 13 March 1882, the Prince and Princess of Wales attended his presentation at the Royal Institution, and London seemed prepared to embrace him as Paris had. The photographer, who was nearly 52, had the foamy beard and fierce eyebrows of an ayatollah, and cut a dashing figure in evening dress. But it was his pictures that astonished. The Photographic News exclaimed, "After Mr Muybridge had shown his audience the quaint and (apparently) impossible positions that the horse assumes in his different gaits, he then most ingeniously combined the pictures on the screen, showing them one after another so rapidly that the audience had before them the galloping horse, the trotting horse, &etc. A new world of sights and wonders was, indeed, opened by photography, which was not less astounding because it was truth itself."  Muybridge's own truth was called into question by the Royal Society a few days after his debut. Stanford and his doctor friend JDB Stillman had published a book behind his back, titled The Horse in Motion as Shown By Instantaneous Photography in which they had denied Muybridge all credit. The Royal Society reproached him, invitations evaporated, his reputation was tarnished, and the humiliated Muybridge scrambled for money to return to the US.  He sued Stanford for injury to his reputation, but suing one of the richest men in the country and one of California's most conscienceless double-crossers was a losing game. Stanford's lawyers managed to shift the focus from the broad array of technical and conceptual achievements of the motion-study photographs to the electrical trigger for Muybridge's cameras made by one of the railroad engineers. They won. Muybridge resumed his experiments in high-speed sequential photography in Philadelphia and his career regained some of its momentum in the later 1880s, but he never reached the heights of attention he had before the defamation. He eventually retired to his birthplace, where he died in 1904.  In his lifetime motion pictures proper were invented, with contributions from Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, and others, and Muybridge was given a little credit for his founding role. But when one of the first histories of motion pictures was written, Muybridge was denied credit all over again. Terry Ramsaye's book, A Million and One Nights, was influenced by one of those surviving engineers, an unscrupulous egomaniac named John D Isaacs. Isaacs had in fact worked on the camera shutters, but in the 1920s, when no one else was around to correct him, he began to exaggerate his role at Muybridge's expense, and Ramsaye took Isaacs at face value, filling his history with slights to Muybridge's contribution and detours into his domestic scandals. Muybridge's reputation remained eclipsed for decades.  History now remembers him in fragments, as a landscape photographer, as a technical innovator, as a key figure in the long march to motion pictures, as the maker of the motion studies whose grids of images and images themselves influenced everyone from the painter Francis Bacon to the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. His accomplishment is so broad and curious that few have assimilated it into what is, despite everything, a coherent achievement. And a new round of challenges to his originality and even his authorship have surfaced in the last few years.  In the course of making the case for Carleton Watkins's genius, the J Paul Getty Museum's just-retired photography curator, Weston J Naef, has been nibbling away at Muybridge's standing. Watkins was a gorgeously gifted landscape photographer whose standing doesn't need enhancement, but Naef in 2008 mounted an exhibition at the Getty that attempted to attribute anonymous images to Watkins on sketchy evidence and suggested that Watkins influenced Muybridge's serial imagery for the motion studies. After the Muybridge show now opening at Tate Britain, opened at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC, Naef gave a long interview suggesting that Watkins, who was the same age but took up photography earlier, helped, taught, mentored and sometimes outright made Muybridge's photographs.  Naef even questioned how Muybridge could have become, in 1868, such a "world-class" photographer with so little background in the medium. The three-part online interview casts doubt on much of Muybridge's achievement, with little evidence other than Naef's standing in the photographic world. The curator even questions whether Muybridge actually went to Alaska in 1868 and made the images published under his name, though they were commissioned by the government and circulated by the artist as his work at the time with no questions asked. The general who commissioned them wrote to Muybridge about them.  It's a campaign of innuendo: Muybridge's 1872 Yosemite photographs are unquestionably brilliant and unquestionably his, but Naef says: "The interesting question is whether Watkins could have been standing nearby coaching him." Given that Muybridge was sometimes standing atop a boulder in the middle of a stream or on a precipice and other places where, the newspaper noted, "his packers refused to follow him", as well as high-country places far above Yosemite Valley that Watkins never photographed and is not known to have gone to, this is unlikely. I asked my sometime collaborator Mark Klett – who worked with photographer Byron Wolfe and me to rephotograph those Yosemite photographs some years ago – an adventure that involved a lot of scrambling to cliff edges – for his opinion.  By rephotographing many of the great 19th-century western landscape photographers, Mark – an important western landscape photographer in his own right – has come to know their work with an intimacy only a fellow maker can achieve. He wrote to me, "I doubt Watkins was standing behind Muybridge coaching him – especially when Muybridge is standing in precarious places. And the compositions are just so different that it would reduce Watkins' role to that of a technical adviser in any case, which is a limited service I would be sceptical that he offered."  I spent some years on a biography of Muybridge, and though his life and work possess many mysteries, there's nothing unbelievable about the pretty-good images of 1868 that led to the spectacular images of 1872, or to the later experiments. One might as well question whether Joseph Conrad wrote his own early work, given the lack of literary talent demonstrated before his first novel was published when he was 37 and the fact that he did not even learn the English language until he was in his 20s.  As Mark puts it, "Finally, regarding the time it took Muybridge to master the process I can only say that each photographer proceeds with technical proficiency at a different pace. He might have been a fast learner, he might have had some technical training, maybe both. We do know that Muybridge demonstrates amazing technical feats others had not been able to perform by the time he works on the motion studies. If he's that proficient later on I would argue he was probably a pretty fast starter to begin with." One hundred and eighty years after his birth, 128 years after his ruckus with the Royal Society, it would be pleasing if his career would settle down. But the pictures speak for themselves.  Eadweard Muybridge is at Tate Britain from 8 September until 16 January 2011. For details go to tate.org.uk/britain
He transformed photography and laid the foundations for motion pictures, but Eadweard Muybridge has always been dogged by controversy. His biographer, Rebecca Solnit, defends the great innovator against a new campaign of innuendo