There is a panel in the early pages of the comic where young Eadweard says goodbye to his mother at the London port before setting sail for New York. Year 1855. "Mother, either I become someone, or you will never hear from me again," he promises.
Thus begins the fascinating adventure of Eadweard James Muybridge (1830-1904), a man who was nobody until he became almost everything. Tireless inventor, creator of motion photography, father of the gif long before the gif existed, pioneer of cinema... and occasional murderer. A character as unknown as he is essential in the history of action in all its forms.
"There is still a bit of Muybridge in our phones today," points out Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle, author of A Fraction of a Second (Ed. Astiberri), a graphic novel that delves into the real life of the man who tamed motion a century and a half ago.
Delisle (Quebec, 59 years old), famous for his autobiographical comics and, above all, for his travel notebooks through Asia and the Middle East (From Shenzhen to Pyongyang passing through his Burmese Chronicles and the Jerusalem Chronicles) now moves to the Wild West to tell Muybridge's story in a period where painting is in decline, photography changes the way we see the world, and the first cinematographs emerge.
"I bought Muybridge's book on The Human Figure in Motion when I was a student of animation. It is a very good reference when you want to learn about action," Delisle recalls about his first encounter with the character. "Later I saw a documentary about him and I was surprised to discover the crazy life he had led. Since he was not very well known, I thought it could be a good story and that people deserved to know his work."
Let's go back for a moment to the scene at the London port. At just 25 years old, young Eadweard decides to emigrate to the United States to make a living. To be someone or to be nothing. He works for five years between New York and San Francisco selling and binding books until an old friend introduces him to photography, an activity in full swing in the mid-19th century after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, a contraption by Louis Daguerre that - as that friend tells him in another panel - allows one to "embalm time, defeat death".
Muybridge is amazed by some panoramas of the Yosemite Valley and decides to leave California tired of books. On his way back to New York by stagecoach, he suffers a serious accident that leaves him in a coma for nine days. When he wakes up, he already has a white beard and a wild character. He returns to London to recover with his mother and under the care of Dr. William Gull, who years later was said to be the alter ego of Jack the Ripper. He goes through France to promote his first major invention, a hand-cranked washing machine, without much success, and tries his luck in the world of finance. But nothing seduces him like the memory of those panoramas, so he sets sail again for America loaded with photography equipment paid for with the compensation for his accident. He works as a portraitist, specializes in capturing natural landscapes, and sets up a traveling studio.
In 1867, he meets Leland Stanford, a character who would change his life. Stanford, the magnate, lawyer, and politician who now gives his name to Stanford University, was the Elon Musk of the time, a sort of Jeff Bezos with a mustache. "I know that most of the big names in Silicon Valley have studied at Stanford University, but Stanford was more interested in horses than artificial intelligence," Delisle jokes.
Leland Stanford first commissions Muybridge to do a photographic report on the new state of Alaska and a few years later recruits him with the sole purpose of winning a bet. The businessman argues in front of a group of friends at the horse races that during a gallop there is a moment when the horse does not touch the ground. They think he's crazy. After many months of testing gadgets and shutters, rehearsing shots, and devising new techniques with Stanford's horse as a model, Eadweard Muybridge manages to prove the magnate right. For a fraction of a second, the horse flies. Click!
"The iconic scene in 'The Matrix' where Neo dodges bullets in slow motion is a good use of Muybridge's invention"
Alongside his experiments, which he would later publish under the title The Horse in Motion (1878), Muybridge also discovers that his wife, who has just given birth to their first child, has been unfaithful to him for months. Eadweard goes mad and murders his wife's lover with a shot to the chest. The jury of the Napa City Court, composed entirely of men, declares him not guilty of justifiable homicide: "We all would have acted the same way."
After his acquittal, Muybridge returns to photography, perfects his technique, publishes his sequences, appears in scientific magazines worldwide, and successfully patents his invention this time: a system with a fixed battery with up to 24 cameras, adjustable shutters, and timers that allows capturing the slightest moment of an action. "The iconic scene in The Matrix where Neo dodges bullets in slow motion is a good use of Muybridge's invention," Delisle explains today. "It is exactly the same method he used in 1878 to photograph the horse. The only difference is the number of cameras. Muybridge used 24 while in The Matrix they used over 100."
-What other lessons does Muybridge's work offer for current technology?
-There is still a bit of Muybridge in today's phone. Even though it's digital, when you take a photo, there is a sound that the manufacturer has put in the phone. It's the sound of the shutter. Digital phones don't have a shutter, but the sound is related to Muybridge because he invented the shutter for his famous horse photos.
After horses, he experimented with deer, dogs, cats, and with pigs, monkeys, bulls, buffaloes, elephants, ostriches, birds... And also with humans in the most unlikely poses. Dressed and naked. And he invented the zoopraxiscope, a device to project his images onto a screen creating an illusion of movement. If you enjoy sending cat gifs, thank Mr. Muybridge. His device, conceived 16 years before the first screening by the Lumière brothers, allowed the development of the early cinema.
When he returned to England, after nearly two decades as a bookseller, landscapist, reporter, photographer, inventor, scientist, lecturer, and occasional murderer, his mother had already passed away. "Either I become someone, or you will never hear from me again".
Characters like Edison and Tesla, Rodin and Degas, the Lumière brothers, Émile Reynaud, or Georges Méliès appear in Delisle's panels. It is their era but also that of a prodigious character who vanished through the seams of History.
"He is not an exception," laments Guy Delisle. "Many of these pioneers of photography and cinema have been forgotten. Who remembers the first filmmaker, William Kennedy Dickson? Who remembers Alice Guy, the first female film director? Both are in my book."
Series of photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge himself in 1878.