Etienne-Jules Marey 1830-1904

Physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey was already famous for his studies of blood circulation and human and animal locomotion when he read about photographer Eadweard Muybridge's sequences of horse photographs in La Nature in December 1878.  Thus began a relationship, through correspondence and later in person, that would prompt Marey to use photography to record movement in aid of his scientific physiological research.

Using a rotating slit shutter at first, he then constructed a photographic gun capturing 12 images per second.  In 1883, he completed a fixed-plate chronophotograph camera that produced sequential images on one plate.  As with this image, the camera required that the subjects wear white or be strongly lit during their movement in front of a black background.  In the early 1890s, Marey created a projector to show lantern slides of his chronophotographs, such as the one offered here. 

'The novelty of chronophotography as a concept, little remarked upon at the time, lies in three areas:  the use of photography to record a phenomenon--of any kind--scientifically; the production of non-realist, even strange pictures of real objects; and finally, the progressive solution of the problem of recreating movement' (Frizot, A New History of Photography, p. 250).  Marey's work significantly influenced the Futurists, Dadaists, and was the basis of Harold Edgerton's stroboscopic photography.