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Friday, 4 July 2025

Muybridge by Guy Delisle Review


Apparently one of the great scientific mysteries of the 19th century was how exactly a horse moves at a gallop(!) with the keenest scientific minds insisting that they run like a frog jumps. It would take the fortune of the richest man in America, Leland Stanford, and the ingenuity of a British photographer whose parents didn’t know how to spell “Edward”, Eadweard Muybridge, to prove otherwise. All that and more in Guy Delisle’s latest book, a comics bio of weird Ed Muybridge!


Muybridge is Delisle’s best book in years. Apparently he’s been fascinated with this person’s work since the late ‘80s when he started out as an animator. Muybridge’s photographs precede motion pictures and a significant part of his life’s work was in capturing the moment-by-moment movements of living creatures in a series of quickly-taken photographs. So it’s easy to understand why animators the world over would study these sequences to learn how to animate.

Muybridge had an interesting life. He initially went to America to make his fortune as a bookseller in San Francisco. When that failed, he headed back east, but got in a near-fatal stagecoach accident and, when he emerged from the coma, his personality had changed (he were meaner) and his hair had turned white. He sat out the civil war in England before returning to America for a second time, this time to try his hand at the emerging new technology of photography and this time was enormously successful.

Along the way, the book reprints Muybridge’s most famous photographs like his Yosemite landscapes, that are still incredibly beautiful, as well as the photograph that proved that horses’ hooves - all four - leave the ground for a split-second when galloping. It really is surprising finding out how much of a big deal this was to people back then to discover that all four horses’ legs left the ground briefly when running at speed. But then again it’s hard to look at early movies like The Arrival of a Train and believe the storm it caused for worldwide audiences who thought a real train was emerging from the screen! I’m sure one day the robot people in the future will look back at our obsession with things like AI and laugh too.

And this book is as much a truncated history of the development of photography from its early days with Louis Daguerre all the way up to the invention of motion pictures and the birth of cinema, which is interesting to read about in its own right. Like Muybridge’s photos, Daguerre’s own photograph of the view out of his apartment onto the Boulevard du Temple in 1838 is reprinted (hauntingly, it looks empty even though it was one of the busiest streets in Paris - the technology at the time meant that if you moved, you wouldn’t be captured in the photo, so only one person appears in the photo because he was having his shoes shined!) as is the photo of a mule getting its head blown off by dynamite in a gruesome experiment to test the sensitivity of new “instant photographs”.

My only critique is that as a biography it feels a bit shallow. Delisle tells us the things that Muybridge did, and it’s very informative in that regard, but I still finished the book without really getting a strong sense of who Muybridge was as a person and that shouldn’t really happen with a good biography. He was a terrible husband, an actual murderer, a totally absent father - as a person he seems repugnant and curmudgeonly. But there’s always more to people than a one-sided view and that three-dimensional perspective isn’t here. Maybe that’s not Delisle’s fault and there just isn’t the material out there to flesh him out, I don’t know.

Delisle’s artwork is as masterful as ever. The characters are cartoonish but expressive and look appealing. You get a strong sense of the age and it looks like he’s faithfully replicated the numerous new technologies that emerged during this time. I like that he also includes mini-flipbooks of a horse galloping or boxers boxing in the page edges, so that you flip the pages and the pictures move. It’s both a nod to Muybridge’s photos and Delisle’s own beginnings as an animator.

Guy Delisle’s Muybridge isn’t the most insightful biography I’ve read but as a narrative of an intriguing man’s life and the development of photography, this comic is quite excellent. Often compelling, edifying in general - a fine overview of this artist, his work and the times he lived in.

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