How Eadweard Muybridge revolutionized photography and got away with murder

CBC

23-07-2025

Eadweard Muybridge is best known for his iconic series of photos of a horse in motion that proved it fully left the ground while running.
But Muybridge also took impressive landscapes of Alaska and Yosemite National Park, invented cutting-edge photography techniques used in Hollywood blockbusters, and quite literally got away with murder after finding out his wife was having an affair — all of which caught the attention of Canadian animator and graphic novelist Guy Delisle.
"I knew Muybridge, but I didn't know all of this life. And I thought, wow, that's crazy. He had gone through so many things that I thought this could be a good subject for a book," said Delisle.
Delisle's latest graphic novel, Muybridge, tells the story behind the man whose books, Animals in Motion and The Human Figure in Motion, are still used by animators as reference books today.
Here's part of his conversation with Day 6 host Brent Bambury.
Let's talk about the images in Animals in Motion, especially the most famous ones of the horses running. When you look at those images, what do you see?
There's kind of a strange mix because they look very modern, but you can tell that they are from a very old time and it's back in the days where … they had no instant photo.
And he still managed to achieve that for the first time with the horse, so that's why this sequence is very symbolic because that's the achievement of his lifetime.
I think he spent seven years just achieving that. And after that, he applied the technique that he developed for the horse at full speed on everything that's moving, basically, animals and humans.
But back in the 1800s, there was this unresolved question about whether all four of the horses' hooves leave the ground at the same time, or is one of them always touching the ground to support the animal.... Why was it so important to Edward Muybridge to be able to answer that question?
It was not so much important to Muybridge, [but] actually to his sponsor, who was the richest guy in the United States at the time, Leland Stanford, the guy who actually opened up Stanford University later on. He was very rich and he [bred] horses and he was really enthusiastic about horses.
He wanted to know exactly how the horse moved in order to breed them better. And it's a bit technical, it's hard to imagine, but it was a big subject at the time between horse people.
And he asked Muybridge because he was a famous photographer.… He asked him to take a picture of a horse at full speed. So he had to go to a speed of 1/1,000th of a second to have something clear with not a blurry photo.
So they tried and it took a long time, but Stanford is not the kind of guy who you can say no to. So Muybridge had to invent a few things to achieve that.
It seems that you suggest that Muybridge was not necessarily interested in the question and the debate about the horse's hooves on the ground, but he was interested in whether the science could be developed, whether the science of photography could answer the question. For him, that was what was important. Is that true?
Yeah, I guess he was caught in the question. I don't think he was such a big horse fan. But the question was very interesting because you can see that through all of his life, he has invented stuff.
He invented a special lens for his camera to be able to have clouds on pictures, because back in the days when you would take long, like one minute, [to take a] picture, so the sky would be white. So he invented something so that he can add clouds afterwards. So he was the first one to have a very nice sky with clouds in his pictures.
So I thought for him, it was a challenge. Like, OK, how can we do that? So he actually invented the shutter. It was like a guillotine system, which goes down very quickly. And he was able to go to one at 1/500th of a second with that.
Then at one point, after a few tries he said, "We have to put like 12 cameras in a row. And while the horse is passing in front of these cameras, there's going to be a little wire going to trigger the camera and the horse is going to take the picture while he's running in front."
The system worked … so you can see actually that the horse for a few steps is floating. It's not touching the ground. So Stanford had his answer and that was first time, actually, that people would see something that the camera could see, but not the eye could see. So it was quite a breakthrough.
While he was away taking photographs, working on commissions, his wife had an affair. Muybridge finds out about this affair and he shoots and kills the man with whom she was having this affair. Muybridge goes to trial for murder and he gets off. Why? What happened?
During the trial, he said, "Yeah, I killed that guy because he's probably the father of the kid that I thought was my kid."
All the jury were actually men with children and it's in California in 1870, in a state where there were two men for one woman. So the jury decided that he did what he had to do, [so] he walked out of the court freely and under the applause of the people.
Muybridge was a huge influence in early photography and then in motion pictures. But as someone now who knows his life very well, and as somebody whose own life is built around the creation of images, what is the thing that stands out the most for you about Edward Muybridge?
For me, I still have that book that I've used when I'm an animator, and even though they're technical … they have a feeling of a Victorian era that whenever I look at them, I've always really enjoyed the artistic quality of it.