945
Chronophotography; Dickson, William Kennedy-
Laurie, Donisthorpe, Wordsworth, Duboscq, Louis
Jules, Friese-Greene, William; Edison, Thomas
Alva; , Instantaneous Photography; Kodak; Le
Prince, Augustin; Lumière, Auguste and Louis;
Marey, Etienne Jules; Muybridge, Eadweard James;
Philosophical Instruments; and Rudge, John Arthur
Roebuck.
Further Reading
Braun, Marta, Picturing Time. The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey
(1830–1904), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Coe, Brian, The History of Movie Photography, Westfi eld, NJ:
Eastview Editions, 1981.
Fusslin, Georg, Optisches Spielzeug oder wie die Bilder laufen
lernen [Optical toys or how Pictures learnt to move], Stuttgart:
Verlag Fusslin, 1993.
Hecht, Hermann, Pre-Cinema History, An Encyclopaedia and
Annotated Bibliography of the Moving Image Before 1896,
London: Bowker-Saur / British Film Institute, 1993.
Herbert, Stephen (Editor), Eadweard Muybridge. The Kingston
Museum Bequest, Hastings: The Projection Box/Kingston
Museum and Art Gallery, 2004.
Herbert, Stephen (ed.), A History of Pre-Cinema (3 vols.), Lon-
don: Routledge, 2000.
Herbert, Stephen, and McKernan, Luke (eds.), Who’s Who of
Victorian Cinema, a worldwide survey, London: British Film
Institute, 1996.
Hendricks, Gordon, Eadweard Muybridge. The Father of the
Motion Picture, Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001
James Laing, “On the Motoroscope,” Proceedings of the Royal
Scottish Society of Arts, 1864.
Mannoni, Laurent, “Archaeology of cinema/pre-cinema.”I In En-
cyclopedia of Early Cinema, edited by Richard Abel, London
and New York: Routledge, 2005.
Mannoni, Laurent (trans. Crangle, Richard), The Great Art of
Light and Shadow. Archaeology of the Cinema, Exeter: Exeter
University Press, 2000.
Musser, Charles, The Emergence of Cinema: The American
Screen to 1907, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University
of California Press, 1990.
Rossell, Deac, Living Pictures. The Origins of the Movies, Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 1994.
MOULIN, FÉLIX-JACQUES-ANTOINE
(1802–c. 1875)
French photographer
One of the most prominent Parisian photographers of
the 1850s, Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin worked in
many genres, utilizing a great variety of techniques.
Sometimes controversial, Moulin aroused a wide range
of critical opinion during his years of greatest activity.
Today he is best known for his production in certain
categories of subject matter, notably the female nude and
orientalist fi gure studies; other aspects of his oeuvre that
were admired in his day, particularly his staged genre
scenes, are now less familiar.
Born in 1802, Moulin may have come from an artisan
background and lacked the art-academy training of some
other important early photographers. The circumstances
of his training as a photographer are unknown. By the
end of the 1840s he was active as a daguerreotypist
with a studio at 31 bis, faubourg Montmartre in Paris.
Moulin’s fi rst documented photographs are academy
or nude studies of female models, nominally for use
by artists. The fi ne Two Standing Nudes in the Metro-
politan Museum of Art, New York belongs to a series
of daguerreotypes depicting carefully lighted models
in natural, relaxed poses before plain backdrops. Sev-
eral of the models are adolescents, their ages carefully
noted in inscriptions of the back of the cases. Several
closely related daguerreotypes now in Vienna (Höhere
Graphische Bundes-Lehr- und Versuchanstalt) bear the
inscribed dates 1849 or 1850.
Moulin apparently also essayed less innocent studies
that led him into legal diffi culties. On July 23, 1851 he
was tried by the Cour d’assises de la Seine, together
with an optician/dealer, Jules Malacrida, and Mme.
veuve René, a maker of daguerreotypes. According to a
contemporary acount, the police “...seized at their homes
a great number of subjects so obscene that to state even
the titles given to them in the judgment would be a viola-
tion of public morality; and the reading of this document
had to take place behind closed doors, along with the
rest of the proceedings” (Annalesde l’imprimerie, no.
6, 1851). Moulin was sentenced to a month in prison
and a fi ne of 100 francs, penalties considerably milder
than those meted out to his co-defendants. Since the
offending images have disappeared, it is not possible to
determine why they were found so objectionable. Serge
Nazarieff has attempted to identify a large number of
anonymous erotic or pornographic daguerreotypes and
salt prints, mainly stereoscopic, as works by Moulin.
Of these, the most plausible attribution is an image of
a clothed youth embracing a nearly nude girl against
the artifi cial backdrop of a hayfi eld, a setting also used
in a number of female nudes attributed to Moulin; this
tableau vivant has some similarities to Moulin’s later
stagings of more conventional genre subjects.
After this setback Moulin was able to reinvent him-
self as a more respectable practitioner, opening a new
entrance to the same studio through 23, rue Richer. He
continued to produce “academies” or female nudes, but
from 1853 onward took the precaution of placing prints
of these images on legal deposit at the Bibliothèque
Impérial, Paris. The young women, often well-known
models, in these images adopt seductive poses and are
accompanied by such boudoir props as mirrors, jew-
elry, and draperies, as they are in contemporary photo-
graphs by Auguste Belloc, Ambroise Richebourg and
others. Usually executed as salt prints, the images are
somewhat larger and more atmospheric than Moulin’s