891
distant and known intervals within a single tracing. He
used a single glass plate in a single camera. Behind
the camera’s lens which was left open, Marey fi xed a
rotating metal disk shutter with from one to ten slots
cut into it at even intervals. His subject—in these early
experiments it was one of the soldier-gymnasts from the
military school of neighbouring Joinville-le-Pont—was
dressed all in white and moved in bright sunlight against
a black background. As the shutter was rotated (by a
crank) its slots exposed the plate, capturing the subject’s
movement as sequence of overlapping images.
To avoid the superimposition of limbs produced by
too rapid shutter rotation, Marey devised a strategy
astonishing for the way it operated against our usual
understanding of the ontology of the photographic im-
age, that is, that cameras inherently replicate all detail
visible to the eye. He covered fi rst half, and then the
entire body of his subject in black and marked its joints
in white. The resulting photographs rendered pure move-
ment as graphic form.
With chronophotography Marey analyzed for the
fi rst time the mechanics of how we actually walk, run
and jump and how the animals with whom we share
this planet move. He also photographed the movement
of the inorganic: the trajectories of projectiles, the geo-
metric forms engendered by a string or wire moving
around an axis, and water where there was no bearer or
guide. In 1900 he moved into the area of aerodynamic
forces, constructing the fi rst wind tunnel in which he
photographed smoke fi lets travelling around differently
shaped planes.
In 1888 when paper negative stripping fi lm appeared
on the French market, Marey replaced his glass plate
with a roll fi lm and constructed a feeding mechanism
for his camera. By early 1889 Marey had made a box
to contain the bobbins, feeding mechanism and the fi lm
which he backed with opaque paper—one of the fi rst
examples of daylight loading fi lm. His camera, fi lms and
the electric zoetrope he made to synthesize his fi lms and
photographs were the centre of the photography section
at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. And while
Marey had no interest in reconstituting the illusion of
movement, his work was the fundamental catalyst to all
those like Edison, the Lumière brothers, and his assistant
Demenÿ, who did.
Marey’s graphing, photographing and cinemato-
graphing methods changed how the working body was
conceived and how it was represented in both the social
and aesthetic domains. He provided a scientifi c basis
for developing the endurance of the soldier, and for the
creation of a national physical education program in
France. His instruments were used to analyze worker’s
movements and even to rationalize a physiological
basis for psychology. After his death a new European
science of work emerged out of his analyses. In America
his separating of the phases of locomotive acts was
complicit in the work of Frederick Taylor and his time-
and-motion-study associates.
After Marey’s death, chronophotography also infl u-
enced how the body was represented in art. The radical
transformation of the experience of time and space
created by the speed and pace of life at the turn of theMAREY, ETIENNE-JULES
Fremont, Charles and
Etienne-Jules Marey.
Trajectory of the
Blacksmiths’ Mallet and
Hammer.
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Purchase, The Horace
W. Goldsmith Foundation
Gift and Rogers Fund, 1987
(1987.1054) Image © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.