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movement in the fi elds of astronomical and anthropo-
logical photography. In astronomy, photographers
including John Herschel, Samuel D. Humphrey (active
1850s), John Adams Whipple (1822–91), and Warren
de la Rue (1815–89) photographed the progression of
heavenly bodies through the night sky in the 1850s
and 60s. Although the subjects of their research were
comparatively slow moving, they were also dimly
illuminated, which made them especially challeng-
ing subjects. The French photographer Jules Janssen
(1824–1907) devised a machine called a photographic
revolver in 1873, which famously enabled him to pho-
tograph the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun
while in Japan in December 1874. The design of the
device, which recorded a series of images in succes-
sion on a circular glass plate, was infl uential to later
chronophotographers, especially Etienne-Jules Marey.
Although anthropological photographers were not as
interested in sequential imagery, throughout the 1850s
and 60s they created systems for recording comparative
measurements photographically. Such photographs have
been described as photometric, or anthropometric. In
Britain, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) and Lord
Granville Leveson-Gower (1815–91) spearheaded a
project to photograph the peoples of the British Empire
through the offi ces of the Colonial Offi ce beginning in
- Huxley’s protocol for making these photographs
involved placing a clearly marked measuring stick of
uniform size and distance next to a nude subject and
parallel to the picture plane, so that precise dimensions
of skeletal and muscle size could be calculated. The
anthropologist J. Lamprey (active 1860s) introduced an
alternative system in a meeting before the Ethnological
Society of London in 1869. Lamprey advocated the use
of a gridded backdrop with both horizontal and vertical
markings so that measurements could be obtained easily
in any direction. Though this system was fl awed in that
the sitter could skew the results by standing relatively
close or far away from the camera, it gained currency
and was applied by Eadweard Muybridge in his Animal
Locomotion photographs of 1884–5.
The inclusion of Muybridge in the ranks of chrono-
photographers is somewhat problematic. His contribu-
tions to stop-action photography are indisputable, and
he arguably exerted more infl uence over the rise of
chronophotography than any other fi gure. However,
unlike most of his colleagues he lacked scientifi c train-
ing and never achieved the rigor of his contemporaries.
Muybridge’s photographs of moving horses and other
animals began in California in the 1870s in the pur-
pose-built laboratory funded by railway magnate and
politician Leland Stanford and constructed by a team
of engineers. While he was ideally equipped to conduct
locomotion experiments and often presented his fi ndings
in a scientifi c context, in fact the power of his images lay
in their visual appeal, refi ned by his acute artistic sense.
This became increasingly apparent with his work at the
University of Pennsylvania from 1884–5, in which he
occasionally inserted or deleted plates to create more
compelling grids. Muybridge was criticised in scientifi c
circles for his superfi cial understanding of biomechan-
ics, and his invariable tendency to emphasise style over
substance. Still, his photographs did contain metric grids
intended to permit the recovery of photometric data, and
were executed at carefully timed intervals. Interestingly,
Muybridge’s initial approach may have been inspired
partly by Oscar Rejlander, who published a paper outlin-
ing a strategy for photographing moving horses in the
British Journal of Photography in 1873.
The French scientist Etienne-Jules Marey was the
central fi gure around whom chronophotography co-
alesced. Starting in the late 1850s, Marey had been
working to devise mechanical means to record human
and animal activities. At fi rst he contrived non-photo-
graphic methods to accomplish this, beginning with
his sphygmograph (a kind of heart monitor) in 1860.
In the ensuing decade he perfected numerous related
devices which enabled him to automatically record
physiological effects; most involved marks registered
on paper attached to a revolving drum resembling a
seismograph or hydrothermograph. He described these
techniques as ‘chronography.’ As his investigations
expanded into the fi eld of human and animal locomo-
tion he eventually adopted photography as a recording
device. In a play on his earlier term he described these
experiments as ‘photochronography’ and ultimately
‘chronophotography.’ Marey developed several tech-
niques for making chronophotographs, including his
‘photographic gun,’ based on the photographic revolver
of Jules Janssen. Marey’s photographs were invariably
exposed on a single plate, with images either separate
or superimposed on each other. This prevented the kind
of photomanipulation of which Muybridge was accused.
Working at the College de France, Marey’s laboratory
thrived. It launched the careers of a number of students
who became prolifi c chronophotographers in their own
right, including Georges Demeny, Albert Londe, and
Lucien Bull (1876–1972).
The Prussian photographer Ottomar Anschütz worked
contemporaneously to Marey, using animals as his main
subjects. Because he was interested in photographing
natural interactions between animals, Anschütz did not
include measuring grids in the frame as Marey and Muy-
bridge did. His skill and equipment were unsurpassed;
his photographs are the sharpest and most detailed of
any chronophotographer. Whereas Muybridge was often
reduced to photographing mere silhouettes, Anschütz
produced images of striking beauty, delineating exact
areas of muscular tension and even individual hairs in
an animal’s fur. His electrotachyscope of 1887 was a