Muybridge (2025)

Listen to this post:

Unless you’re a student of photography or heavily interested in animation, chances are your only exposure to the name Eadweard Muybridge in recent pop-culture has been the brief mentions he gets in Jordan Peele’s 2022 release Nope, where Keke Palmer’s character describes a two-second clip of a galloping horse being shown as the first example of a ‘motion picture’. It’s actually from a later effort, “Plate Number 626”, in which the horse, Annie, is named while the jockey riding her is not.

Dubious history aside, Peel’s film is still a loving homage to what many consider the defining characteristic of Muybridge’s legacy, capturing an uncapturable moment on film. Another would be Guy Delisle’s Muybridge, his first non-autobiographical graphic novel since 2017’s Hostage and his first overall since his backward-looking World Record Holders back in 2022.

Acclaimed for his illustrated travelogues to Shenzhen, Jerusalem, and Burma, Delisle literally draws upon research, documents, and his expertise as a professional animator to chronicle a man many call “the father of motion pictures”, helped by a fine translation from Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall.

It’s no surprise Delisle would find Muybridge’s life worthy of attention, seeing how his story is…well, let’s just say he was complicated. Muybridge was a man constantly reinventing himself in pursuit of his goals (even his name was a reinvention, his birth name Edward James Muggeridge). Born in England, he would leave home and eventually land in San Francisco to make his fame and fortune “or you would never hear from me again,” he purportedly told his grandmother. Success would come, but not without struggle.

His first American endeavors met with little fanfare; his professional and personal life would be endlessly chaotic; a failed bookseller, he would survive a near-fatal stagecoach accident, be exonerated for killing his wife’s lover (by reason of insanity), endure public humiliation (and later public redemption), and narrowly avoid conscription to fight in the US Civil War. Muybridge would eventually succeed in what would become his chosen field: photography. Specifically, landscape photography, capturing the still-untamed American western frontier like no one had before.

His notoriety would soon command the attention of Leland Stanford, a former Governor of California whose financial interests in horse breeding led him to commissioning Muybridge to provide photographic evidence that horses gallop with all feet simultaneously in the air, which many thought impossible. The issue was exposure, as a decent still-frame of a moving horse (or any object in motion) was impossible to capture with then-current photographic technology.

This meant entirely new ways of thinking about photography, ways aided by cutting-edge science and technology, made easier by the massive budget from his benefactor, of course. Muybridge would construct entire buildings to house his cameras and advanced electrical riggings to trigger their shutters faster, as well as a new chemical mixture that was more light sensitive, therefore more capable of capturing moments up to a fraction of a second.

After much trial and error, Muybridge would eventually succeed in capturing the airborne gait of Stanford’s horse, his photographic techniques considerably advancing chronophotography, where small movements captured using still photographs, when played in rapid sequence, would give the appearance of movement, i.e. the moving pictures.

Little did anyone realize what began as commissioned work would soon transform not only the lives of those involved, but propel both the art and science of photography (as well as the fields of art and science themselves) into completely new realms of possibilities, though not without angering a few sacred lambs. Muybridge’s photos would cause a sensation, his newfound fame seeing him return to England in triumph. After learning that Leland Stanford would take credit for his innovations, however, he would leave the country in disgrace.

Delisle takes us on a journey documenting the creation of what we call the camera, tracing its earliest stages of development from the creation of Daguerreotype to the commercialization of entertainment in the hands of visionaries like Thomas Edison or Auguste and Louis Lumière, the brothers whose invention, the Cinematograph, is where the term cinematography is derived.. But mostly, we see the evolution of photography itself, helped along by many people who played pivotal roles in its evolution yet whose names and contributions have largely been forgotten.

Delisle brings his trademark visual style illustrating this story with humor and the appropriate gravitas when necessary, his artwork often supplemented by many of the actual photographs discussed. He serves as both narrator and tour guide, often breaking the third wall to explain or put information in historical context, such as when he compares Muybridge’s experiments with chronophotography with more recent cinematic efforts such as the iconic multi-camera “bullet time” effects seen in The Matrix.

Much like his past autobiographical efforts, Delisle’s playful presentation and earnestness comes off more like a celebration of its subject and less like stale regurgitation of factoids, a fate that too often sullies even the best-intentioned historical graphic novels.

Despite carrying only the name of its subject, Muybridge is really an exploration of both the people and events that would transform still photography into moving pictures, with the graphic novel perhaps the perfect medium to tell this story – and Guy Delisle its perfect storyteller. As an animator, he provides incredible insight into not only what makes the often turbulent life of his subject so fascinating but also revolutionary, reinforcing the oft-forgotten reality that true innovation relies just as much on collaboration as it does inspiration.