When graphic artist Guy Delisle began learning animation, he discovered Eadweard Muybridge’s collection of stop-action photographs, “Animals in Motion,” first published in 1902. “I remember spending hours studying all those black-and-white sequences,” Delisle writes in “Muybridge,” a graphic history of the pioneering photographer. “There’s no better reference for understanding the mechanics, balance, and weight of a movement.”
As a young man, the English-born Muybridge (1830-1904) sought fame and fortune in America, first in New York and then in San Francisco. After 10 years and no fame as a bookseller, he decided to return home to England. On the way east, Muybridge sustained a head injury in a stagecoach crash that, according to people who knew him, changed his temperament: He became more aggressive and impulsive. When he reached England, his mother oversaw his recovery, and on his return to America in 1866, he embarked on a new career in photography.
He began taking extraordinary pictures of San Francisco, Yosemite Valley, and parts of Alaska on regular photography expeditions. In 1871, he married a woman half his age. Shortly after the birth of their son, Muybridge murdered his wife’s lover, for which he was jailed and faced execution. A jury of 12 men acquitted him for “justifiable homicide.” The jurors maintained that they would have committed the same act in his situation.
Why We Wrote This
We take for granted today that photography can capture the quickest action. In the late 19th century, innovator Eadweard Muybridge used banks of cameras to document movement clearly. He also invented the first movie projector.
Leland Stanford, a former governor of California and a railroad tycoon, funded Muybridge’s experiments in motion photography to gain new information about racehorses. Before the technology of cameras and processing materials improved, Muybridge (and every other photographer) had difficulty capturing clear images of movement.
While shooting what became a renowned panorama from San Francisco’s Nob Hill, it dawned on Muybridge (as Delisle re-creates it), “What if I had a dozen cameras … ? I could place them in a circle and photograph everything at once.” Muybridge painstakingly eliminated the obstacles of triggering 12 cameras as a horse ran by them. The news of Muybridge’s success (though Stanford, who financed the operation, began claiming at least equal share of the credit) was globally communicated by telegraph. “Before long, the whole world knew what happened on June 15, 1878, at Stanford’s Ranch in Palo Alto,” Delisle writes.
Muybridge gave public lectures across America and in Europe, showing off his impressive still photographs and, as a finale, a demonstration of a “moving picture” of the animals in motion. Muybridge had invented what is regarded as the first movie projector. “I understand that a few thousand years of pictorial representation are not easily cast aside,” Delisle’s Muybridge tells a skeptical French audience of painters, none of whom had been able to catch how the legs of a galloping horse actually move. Less modestly, Muybridge crows, “You have before you the man who stopped time.”
At the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge set up 12 banks of cameras – a total of 36 devices – to capture the motion of every animal he could cajole from zookeepers. He also photographed human volunteers, clothed and unclothed, running, walking, and performing exercises. “In all, he exposed more than twenty thousand negatives during the two years he spent capturing all that movement,” Delisle writes. The books Muybridge produced from those negatives were not popular in his time, but he gave hundreds of lecture-demonstrations that were. As competing film projectors and setups were invented in the 1890s, Muybridge’s heyday faded, and biographers don’t know if Muybridge ever saw the turn-of-the-century phenomenon that became known as “the movies” – not just life in motion but stories in motion. Muybridge, out of the limelight, retired to England, where he died in 1904.
Delisle’s cartooning is spare compared with the work of such graphic artists as Joe Sacco, but it is efficient, pleasing; his comic-book style is reminiscent of Hergé’s “The Adventures of Tintin.” In some of the biography’s most captivating pages, for example, Delisle mimics Muybridge’s ingenious in-motion photographs. Delisle also adds flip-book elements as well as dozens of the famous photographs themselves.
Muybridge composed images that startled, entertained, and educated people everywhere. The photos were “nothing less than the precise decomposition of a movement that is invisible to the naked eye.”
