It was one of the biggest talking points of the 19th century: whether a galloping horse lifted all four hooves off the ground simultaneously. Painters struggled with the notion, often wrongly depicting the animals doing a sort of leap, their limbs outstretched front and back. Then, in the 1870s, the great British adventurer Eadweard Muybridge closed the debate, devising photography with quick enough exposure times to isolate the horses in motion – and airborne.
“Lots of people didn’t accept it,” says Guy Delisle. “When they saw a photograph of the horse gathering its hooves, they said it looked like a dead spider. But when the photographs were projected in sequence, they said, ‘It’s true!’”
