[Fall 2025]
Pour une fraction de seconde
by Michel Hardy-Vallée
Paris, Delcourt, 2024, 202 pages
[EXCERPT]
For a work to be called a photograph, it must contain at least one image. Add a second one and you have a comic strip. And with a third, you have a film if you make them scroll by quickly. I’m simplifying, of course, but the fact that the borders between these media are subtle and thin is fundamentally Guy Delisle’s point. Indeed, how was film invented? Eadweard Muybridge didn’t just wake up one morning with the idea of making little pieces of animation. But the result of his photographic analysis of the movement of horses opened the breach through which the medium of cinema emerged.
Delisle – known for his autobiographical graphic novels, such as Pyongyang (2003) and Chroniques de Jérusalem (2011), in which he lays out fraught geopolitical contexts with disarming simplicity – is both a storyteller and an educator. Here, he has produced a biography of Muybridge from when he arrived in the United States from his native country, England, in 1855, to his death, in 1904. To explain how he managed to prove that all four hooves of a galloping horse are off the ground for a fraction of a second (and why this question was important), Delisle interweaves several storylines. First, a condensed history of photography gives us an understanding of the technical nature of the challenge facing Muybridge. Then, a biography of the man shows him as incandescent but moulded by trauma. Finally, the narrative incorporates the industrialist Leland Stanford, who wanted to prove that he was right about how horses move. He inspired and financed Muybridge’s early experiments. None of it was aimed at inventing the technical product of his work.
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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 130 – PLANTS AND GARDENS ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Pour une fraction de seconde]
Michel Hardy-Vallée is a historian of photography, independent curator, and Visiting Scholar at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University. His research is concerned with photography books, visual narration, interdisciplinary practices, and the archive, in the contexts of Quebec and Canada. He is the author of Premières planches: photos de John Max (VU, 2025).