Muybridge by Guy Delisle. Translation by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall. Drawn & Quarterly, 2025. 9781770467729. 218pp. Includes credits for all photos in the book and a timeline of the lives of the artists, photographers, and others appearing in the book.
On the first page of this graphic novel, Delisle summarizes the mystery of the galloping horse and shows Muybridge in the last “panel” as the young Englishman who would eventually solve the mystery (while working for Leland Stanford). What Delisle doesn’t say is that in pioneering the photographic methods that solved that mystery, Muybridge became the first person to animate photographs, leading to movies and more.
Muybridge’s story begins in 1850 when he arrives in New York and becomes a bookseller. “This wasn’t the adventure he had hoped for.” Ha. He went to San Francisco, where he met a friend working for a portrait photographer. And the rest is history, kinda. After failing at the American dream, a gruesome accident, and a return to England to recover, Muybridge returned to the US as a photographer. Not too much later, he headed west and took pictures of the then-unknown Yosemite Valley. The rest of his story is crazy — it includes not only the history of photography and early filmmaking but also a murder and more.
Delisle includes photos as part of the narrative, both by Muybridge and others. I haven’t seen photos this well integrated into a graphic novel since reading Guibert’s The Photographer.
My favorite moment of the book is when, after achieving fame for his photos of a galloping horse, Muybridge decides to capture the motion of other animals and people. This is Victorian times, and he wants people to be photographed nude to show their bodies in motion, but no one will do it. This is why there is a 12-photo sequence of a naked Muybridge, age forty-eight, swinging a pickax. That’s dedication. (My second favorite, and the most unexpected moment, is Delisle’s note about how Muybridge’s techniques led to the way the action sequences in The Matrix were filmed. Very cool.)
