Edwin Stanton Porter

Edwin Stanton Porter was one of the first Edison Company’s director-cameraman. He’s famous primarily for his work in The Great Train Robbery (1903). Later, he invested in his own film equipment company, but the 1929 stock market crash put him out of business. In the 1930s he worked on home-movie cameras.

With his most important movie, The Great Train Robbery, inspired by a real robbery, Porter defined the canons of american western film, which will have a tremendous success in the following decades.

Porter was inspired by a very popular topic of the time, in novels and theatrical melodramas, that he transformed into a visual pioneering work of art, very important in the history of American cinema.