Equestrian photography has long relied on a familiar defence when uncomfortable images surface: they are just moments in time. Taken out of context. Unfair. Misleading. According to this logic, still images that show tension, open mouths, compressed blue tongues or strained expressions are dismissed as aberrations—visual glitches that say more about the photographer than about the horse.
In his webinar, photographer and visual artist Crispin Parelius Johannessen turns this argument inside out.
Rather than retreating from the accusation, he followed it to its logical conclusion.
If troubling images are dismissed because they isolate a fraction of a second, what happens if you document all the fractions of a second?
The webinar centres on one such example: a single Grand Prix dressage test, performed by one horse, documented frame by frame. Over the course of roughly eight minutes, more than 8,000 images were recorded—capturing not an exceptional case, but one complete performance, as it unfolded in real time.
Watch the Webinar:
Click here to view the Dropbox folder for this single test.
From single frames to sequences
Crispin began photographing horses years ago as an accredited press photographer, producing the images the equestrian media expects: the suspended phase over a jump, the peak of extension, the perfectly timed moment where horse and rider appear in harmony. These “trophy shots” dominate magazines, social media feeds, and public perception of horse sport.
But as he reviewed his own archives, something became impossible to ignore: those moments were rare. They depended on a precise alignment of timing, angle, and selection. Out of thousands of images in a short sequence, only a handful would ever be considered publishable.
So when his photographs began to attract criticism—accusations of cherry-picking bad moments, of seeking out ugliness—he responded not by narrowing his lens, but by widening it.
He invested in high-speed photographic equipment capable of capturing up to 120 frames per second, allowing him to document continuous sequences rather than isolated stills. For every Grand Prix performance, there are well over 8,000 images covering the 8 minute performance.
The result was not clarification in favour of the traditional narrative—but its destabilisation.
The “Trophy Shot”: The real illusion
Seen in sequence, Crispin argues, it is not the “bad” images that are misleading.
It is the trophy shots.
Those celebrated images—the ones that circulate endlessly as proof of harmony, lightness, and partnership—are the true visual anomalies. They are the moments that depend on illusion: the right angle that hides pressure, the split second that conceals strain, the framing that removes context rather than providing it.
When the same horse is viewed frame by frame, from moment to moment, the idealised picture dissolves. Mouths do not suddenly close between frames. Tension does not vanish. The body does not reorganise itself into effortless balance except for the benefit of a camera shutter.
What emerges instead is continuity: patterns of posture, pressure, and response that are invisible when only a single, carefully selected image is allowed to stand in for reality.
In other words, sequence restores context. And context is precisely what selective imagery removes.
A long discomfort with seeing
Crispin places this resistance to photographic evidence within a much longer history. From prehistoric cave paintings to early motion studies, humans have always struggled when visual technologies reveal something that contradicts what we believe we see.
When Eadweard Muybridge first photographed horses in motion, his images showed that artists—and audiences—had been wrong for centuries about how horses move. The camera did not invent distortion; it exposed the limits of human perception.
The reaction was ambivalent then, too. The moving sequences were celebrated. The still frames—some awkward, strained, or unfamiliar—were ridiculed as grotesque. Viewers preferred the illusion that aligned with expectation.
Johannessen suggests that equestrian culture has inherited this same discomfort. Still images that reveal tension provoke denial. Sequences that confirm those stills provoke silence.
Controlling the visual narrative
The webinar also exposes how power operates through what is not shown. Equestrian publishing relies on an extreme filtering process: thousands of images reduced to a few that fit an aesthetic ideal. The rest—often the majority—remain unseen, deleted, or archived out of public reach.
This is not censorship in the formal sense. No rulebook forbids photographing discomfort. But photographing the “wrong moment” can lead to hostility, revoked access, and professional exclusion. Control is exercised socially, culturally, and economically.
The result is a visual culture that trains audiences to recognise harmony—and to distrust their own perception when confronted with anything else.
Why this matters
Crispin’s work matters because it challenges a foundational assumption: that equestrian imagery documents reality rather than constructs it.
By inverting the “moments in time” argument, he shows that the story we tell ourselves about horses and riders is not revealed by isolated instants of beauty, but maintained by them. The more carefully those instants are selected, the less they reflect the lived experience of the horse.
Watching the full webinar allows viewers to see this process unfold visually: the sequence itself, the surrounding frames, and the way meaning changes when continuity replaces selection. But the central message is simple and unsettling:
If we want to understand what horses are experiencing, we need more images, not fewer. Longer sequences, not perfect moments. And the courage to look at what appears when the illusion no longer holds.
For transparency, the complete image sequence discussed in the webinar—over 8,000 frames from this single test—is available to view in full via the linked Dropbox folder below. Readers are invited to examine the sequence themselves and draw their own conclusions.
Click here to view the Dropbox folder for this single test.
Supporting the work
Producing this kind of documentation is slow, technically demanding, and largely unsupported. Each performance Crispin Parelius Johannessen records generates thousands of images, the vast majority of which will never be seen—but which are essential to preserving context, continuity, and evidential value. Cameras, computers, storage, travel, time on the ground and processing, and years of accumulated skill all sit behind what may look, on the surface, like a simple act of looking.
If we believe that cultural change depends on seeing more rather than less—on expanding what counts as legitimate visual evidence—then this work needs sustaining.
Supporting Crispin’s ongoing documentation helps ensure that these full sequences continue to be recorded, preserved, and made available: not just the moments that reassure us, but the moments that tell the truth when viewed together.
If you are able, please consider contributing to the crowdfunding campaign by clicking here.
Watch the scientific presentation made to the FEI on bridle pain in dressage horses
