In the early 1870s, Leland Stanford, railroad robber baron and founder of Stanford University, was obsessed with determining whether all four of a galloping horse’s hooves left the ground at the same time. Over the centuries, sculptors and painters could only guess at the mechanics of a speeding horse’s gait. Whose eyeballs, after all, were that quick? At his grand estate in Sacramento in 1872, Stanford called upon the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge to answer the question once and for all, a seemingly impossible feat at a time when a typical camera exposure was measured in minutes. Six years later, Muybridge accomplished the task, garnering international acclaim, launching the art of time-lapse photography, and laying the technological groundwork for what would become the animation and motion picture industries.
Guy Delisle’s graphic novel about the 19th-century photographer, Muybridge, is a marked departure for the award-winning Canadian cartoonist and graphic novelist, who is best known for autobiographical works detailing his globe-spanning travels as an itinerant film animator (Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea) and stay-at-home dad (Burma Chronicles, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City).
Delisle’s sole previous attempt at biography, the 2017 graphic novel Hostage, was not a bio in the traditional sense. “That one was about a friend of mine who worked in humanitarian aid and was kidnapped for three months in Chechnya,” he says. “So that was just three months of his life. But I thought I’d like to try that again. It’s interesting to have someone else talking instead of you.”
Delisle first learned about Muybridge as a young animator, when he came upon the photographer’s landmark books Animals in Motion and The Human Figure in Motion. First published at the end of the 19th century, the photo collections contain page after page of moving bodies: elks galloping and vultures in flight, young men and women, many of them naked, tossing boulders and playing leapfrog. The books have since become essential reference guides for generations of artists, illustrators, and animators. “People are still buying it, even though it was first printed 150 years ago,” Delisle says of The Human Figure in Motion.
Years later, Delisle learned about the incredible life of the photographer behind the photos: Muybridge’s journey as a young man from London to San Francisco, where he found a job in the nascent media of photography; his pioneering images of Alaska (the first of the then-new United States territory) and Yosemite; the horrific stagecoach accident that led to a serious brain injury and subsequent treatment by the doctor William Gull, who may or may not have been Jack the Ripper; his cold-blooded murder of his young wife’s lover, and eventual acquittal for the crime; his groundbreaking work for Stanford, who later stole credit for Muybridge’s photos and sullied his reputation; his creation of the zoopraxiscope, a hand-cranked predecessor of the modern movie projector; and so on. “As a storyteller, you go, Wow, this is great,” Delisle says. “I can do a book with that.”
Delisle expands the narrative beyond the borders of the photographer’s admittedly momentous life to cover major events in the history of photography and film, including appearances from Thomas Edison, Charles Baudelaire, and Edgar Degas. The book also features dozens of archival photos, including the world’s first photograph, gorgeous images of Stanford’s Nob Hill mansion (before it burned down following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), paintings of horses through history, and a U.S. Army image of a mule being blown to bits with dynamite. Fittingly, the cartoon action in the book itself is cinematic, with bonus flip-books (flip through some of the pages and you’ll see a horse gallop and two men box) and a slo-mo sequence, over several panels and pages, of Muybridge shooting his rival to death. “At the end of his life, a person asked Muybridge if he regretted having killed someone, and he said, The only regret I have is that he didn’t suffer long enough,” Delisle said. “So, yeah, not a very nice guy.”
Even so, his impact has been undeniable. In addition to his essential photo reference books, Muybridge’s advances form the basis behind cinematic visual effects like the “bullet time” scene in the 1999 film The Matrix, in which bullets whiz past Keanu Reeves’s head in slow motion. He also created the high-speed shutter, which lives on in our post–film camera age. “Every time you take a picture with your digital camera, you hear that little click, click sound of the shutter that they put in at the factory,” Delisle says. “That was invented by Muybridge, so he’s still in there, in your phone, a little bit.”
Delisle is currently working on another biography, this one about Ambroise Vollard, a French art dealer who discovered and championed artists like Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vincent van Gogh. Delisle was intrigued by the stories of both Vollard and Muybridge, so much so that the graphic novelist wasn’t sure who to write about first. “Vollard had a crazy life too,” Delisle says. “So I really wanted to talk about him. But he didn’t murder anyone, so that’s why he went second.”•
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