New Graphic Novel Illustrates Life of Photographer Eadweard Muybridge
Critically acclaimed cartoonist and graphic novelist Guy Delisle turned his artistic talents toward creating a graphic novel biography of pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer known for his imagery of the 19th century American West and innovative photographic studies of motion. His most famous work the Horse in Motion is a cabinet card series, the first example of chronophotography, documented the passage of time through the phases of a horse’s locomotion. He created it to prove a point, to freeze time and see beyond the human eye to find out if horses “float” with all four hooves on the ground momentarily when they gallop.
As the novel’s blurb describes, “Sacramento, California, 1870. Pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge becomes entangled in railroad robber baron Leland Stanford’s delusions of grandeur. Tasked with proving Stanford’s belief that a horse’s hooves do not touch the ground while galloping at full speed, Muybridge gets to work with his camera. In doing so, he inadvertently creates one of the single most important technological advancements of our age — the invention of time-lapse photography and the mechanical ability to capture motion.”
To create his photographs, Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope, which displayed moving images, the predecessor of the movie projector. These moving picture studies, some of the first motion picture projections, are touted as the world’s first bit of cinema and mark his place in history as well as worth an illustrative biography.
With Delisle’s graphic novel Muybridge, he documents the photographer’s immigration from England to America in the 1850s. Starting with Eadweard Muybridge’s first arrival in New York, fateful injury in 1860, and how it led to his initial start as a portrait photographer before taking off into the wilds of Yosemite where his vision and photographic journey as an innovator began.
Beautifully illustrated and detailed, Muybridge is also interspersed with historic photographs and paintings, giving viewers a full perspective of the artist’s life and times through his passing in 1904. Publisher Drawn & Quarterly describes, “Delisle’s keen eye for details that often go unnoticed in search of a broader emotional truth brings this historical figure and those around him to life through an uncompromising lens.
Translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall, the graphic novel Muybridge by Guy Delisle will be available on April 29 at $15 for e-book and $25 for hardcover with a book tour to follow.
Image credits: From ‘Muybridge,’ copyright Guy Delisle, translation copyright Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall.
