The Photographer by Phillip Glass

The Photographer is a modern experimental chamber opera based on the life and work of the pioneering 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. The opera is a mixture of dramatic scenes flavored with incidental music, abstract music with motion, graphic visual accompaniment, and modern dance.

The Photographer focuses on the great melodramatic incident in Muybridge's life: his murder of his wife's lover. Defending the act as a crime of passion, Muybridge is acquitted. He then throws himself into his work, inventing the techniques for the world’s earliest experiments in motion picture photography. Muybridge is tortured by the memory of the murder and his wife’s infidelity, but finally finds peace and transcends his past by creating entirely original photographic art.

Muybridge's Victorian imagery and sequential motion studies depict a shadowy area among Victorian kitsch, cliché, dawning modernity, and present-day ''process art''—this last represented in the motion graphics of Muybridge's running, leaping figures set against Mr. Glass's modular, repetitive music.

There has never been a theatrical piece like The Photographer. The production uses many mediums—music, drama, dance, and film—to weave a hypnotic tapestry incorporating the creative process, memory, perception, and human passion.

Rated R for nudity and violence – Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.