Étienne-Jules Marey

Marey’s Physiological Research and Turn to Photography

Étienne-Jules Marey was born in Beaune, France, in 1830 and trained in medicine and physiology in Paris. He served as professor of physiology at the Collège de France and devoted many years to measuring and recording bodily functions such as blood circulation, respiration, and muscular contraction.^*1 He began using photography as a research tool in the 1880s, developing a method known as chronophotography, in which multiple exposures were superimposed on a single photographic plate.^*2 This technique made it possible to record the flight of birds, people running and jumping, and the flow of air as visual diagrams for analysis.^*3 In 1882, he completed his chronophotographic gun, which could take twelve consecutive frames per second. He died in Paris in 1904.^*4

Marey began as a physiologist, not a photographer. He had developed a “graphic method” for measuring continuously changing phenomena—including human and animal movement, respiration, and blood flow—as lines and diagrams over time. Photography did not replace this research; it was introduced to preserve the form of the moving body itself along a time axis, in place of the traces made by mechanical needles. Seen as an extension of this work, chronophotography emerged as an instrument of physiological measurement, not as a means of producing beautiful sequential images.^*24

Mark Paterson regards Marey’s “graphic method” as a precursor to contemporary motion capture. For Marey, the goal of photography was not the finished image itself. It was an apparatus for transcribing movement into lines, trajectories, and temporal intervals, thereby transferring phenomena that perception alone could not compare into another system of signs.^*30 From this perspective, chronophotography belongs to the history of science’s transformation of the body into data as well as to the history of photography.

Nineteenth-Century Physiology and the Quantification of the Body

Marey’s turn to photography grew out of a nineteenth-century physiological effort to measure the body not solely as anatomical form, but as force, pressure, and velocity changing over time. Marey’s own 1883 paper examined the forces involved in walking and running and compared bodily movement in quantitative terms.^*25 Chronophotography transferred this logic of quantification to photography, turning the body’s contours into visual data corresponding to temporal intervals.

This method was also connected to modern industrial society’s analysis of the body in terms of efficiency. Scholarship in labor history has argued that, even before Frederick Taylor, the motion studies of Marey and Muybridge prepared a vocabulary for segmenting the laboring body and visualizing efficiency.^*26 This does not mean that Marey himself should simply be regarded as a theorist of factory management. The important point is that physiological measurement contributed to a modern way of seeing that treated the body as a set of comparable units of movement rather than as individual experience.

The Principle of Chronophotography

The core of Marey’s method was the analytical compression of time into a single image by superimposing multiple exposures on one dry plate. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Bird in Flight is widely cited as a typical example of this technique: multiple images of the bird’s moving wings overlap, making every phase of the movement visible at once within one photograph.^*5 The Uffizi Galleries’ account of Le Mouvement (1894) explains chronophotography as a method for comparing the stages of movement by recording a body’s successive positions on the same plate.^*6 For Marey, photography was not a means of aesthetic expression but an instrument for measuring laws of motion that the naked eye could not grasp. The Collège de France’s history of this research likewise traces his path from the mechanical recording of physiological phenomena to the analysis of human and animal movement, culminating in chronophotography during the 1880s.^*7 Chronophotography can therefore be said to have visualized the structure of time, not merely its instants.

The Laboring Body and Efficiency

Marey’s research extended beyond birds in flight and acrobats to the laboring body. His collaborative studies with the researcher Frémont on bodily movement and energy expenditure had implications that connected them to the fundamental principles of efficiency in modern industrial production.^*8 Materials from a 2024 exhibition at the Collège de France trace how Marey, working from the premise that mechanical principles could also be applied to living phenomena, sought to use instruments to visualize and measure invisible movement. Viewing the history of measurement as a continuum from the graphic method before the introduction of photography through chronophotography clarifies why his photographs emerged at the boundary between science and visual culture.^*9 Educational materials from the Cinémathèque française present his chronophotography as part of the prehistory of cinema and motion analysis. Their interpretation that it opened a path toward optical devices capable of producing sequential images is also useful from the standpoint of film history.^*10 The Camera Museum’s permanent exhibition similarly positions Marey’s method as one of the technological innovations that prepared the way for the century of film.^*11

Paterson also notes that Marey’s records of motion were inherited as a precursor to Taylorist studies of labor in the early twentieth century.^*30 Once photography could segment and compare actions and isolate wasted effort, instead of merely displaying beautiful bodily poses, motion study became a form of knowledge applicable beyond medicine and physiology to factories and labor management. Marey’s significance lies both in his innovation in visualizing movement and in his role in preparing a visual system through which modern society treated the body as a measurable resource.

Differences from Muybridge’s Method

Comparison with Eadweard Muybridge brings Marey’s distinctive approach into sharper focus. Muybridge divided time among multiple cameras and presented it as a sequence of independent still images, while Marey folded time into a single frame.^*12 This distinction concerns more than visual method; it reflects different ideas about what photography could do. Marey’s single image presented movement as an abstract diagram—a form that converted time into space.^*13 This model became a visual reference for later modernist painting and Futurist efforts to represent movement through divided planes, connecting Marey’s work to twentieth-century visual culture as well as to the prehistory of cinema. ACMI holds and exhibits Marey’s chronophotographic prints within the context of screen culture, demonstrating the continuity between motion photography and moving-image culture.^*14

The Photographic Gun and Fixed-Plate Chronophotograph

In 1882, inspired by astronomer Pierre-Jules-César Janssen’s “photographic revolver,” Marey devised a gun-shaped photographic apparatus. It could follow a bird in flight or another moving subject while recording approximately twelve frames per second with a single device, eliminating the need for the array of cameras used by Muybridge.^*22

That same year, Marey went on to develop a fixed-plate method. A rotating shutter with slits repeatedly exposed a moving subject against a black background onto the same dry plate at regular intervals. The Science Museum Group dates this fixed-plate chronophotograph to around 1882.^*21 To make the trajectories of arms and legs easier to read, Marey sometimes attached white lines or reflective markers to black clothing. Instead of separating each instant into a different photograph, he transformed time into a spatial trajectory within a single frame.^*5

Film Chronophotography and the Prehistory of Cinema

His later apparatuses developed beyond fixed dry plates toward the intermittent transport of a strip of celluloid to record sequential images. The Science Museum Group describes his 1890 dual-purpose camera as an apparatus approaching the fundamental features of a motion-picture camera: exposure and film transport.^*23 Its connection to cinema lay less in a single finished photograph than in a mechanism that converted time into visual information at equal intervals and recorded it on a continuous support. This history of apparatus explains why Marey is best positioned not simply as an “inventor” of cinema, but as a key precursor who moved from motion studies toward the technology of sequential photography.^*24

The Geometric Body and Training

Marey’s assistant Georges Demenÿ developed a method of marking black clothing with white lines and dots to record the body as geometric trajectories resembling a skeleton. MoMA’s Untitled (Sprinter) is an example in which the exposure intervals were set to match the runner’s stride; the museum’s account also notes that Demenÿ later applied Marey’s method to physical training in the French military.^*27 Here, the photograph became a diagram for comparing the angles at which the limbs moved and the paths along which force was transferred, not a portrait preserving the body’s appearance.

Park Sangwoo analyzes how Marey responded to the difficulty of reading bodily contours in overlapping multiple exposures. He developed a method that recorded only white lines and joint markers on black clothing, reducing the body to the geometric elements of lines and points.^*31 This did not make the photograph more “realistic.” On the contrary, the structure of movement became easier to read as the body’s outward appearance was discarded. This movement between photograph and diagram succinctly demonstrates that Marey used images as a physiologist rather than as a photographer.

Futurism and Duchamp—Scientific Images Enter Art

Chronophotography did not remain confined to scientific research. MoMA identifies Marey’s sequential images as an important source for Futurist painters such as Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, offering a visual vocabulary that represented movement as multiple phases of a single body.^*27 Recent scholarship on the history of the body has also described how Marey’s geometric motion images spread through early twentieth-century visual culture, including Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.^*28 Their importance lies less in the direct “transformation into art” of scientific photography than in the way a form that represented time through lines, repetition, and trajectories became a visual language shared by science and art.

In his study of Futurist photography, Giovanni Lista explains that Marey’s chronophotographs influenced not only Italian Futurists such as Balla, Russolo, and Carrà, but also European avant-garde figures including Duchamp, Malevich, and Larionov.^*32 The layering of time devised for scientific analysis was repurposed in art as a formal vocabulary for speed, repetition, and simultaneity. Marey’s images matter not simply because scientific photography was “quoted” by art, but because they provided twentieth-century art with a visual form that converted time into space.

The Reception of Chronophotography and the Prehistory of Cinema

Marey’s reception has developed through museum collections and exhibitions at institutions such as MoMA, the Musée d’Orsay, and SFMOMA, which evaluate his work in relation to both the histories of photography and cinema.^*15 The Musée d’Orsay exhibition Movements of Air: Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), Photographer of Fluids attracted attention as an important effort to reposition chronophotography within the context of the visual arts.^*16 Chronophotographic films held by the Science Museum Group are preserved as material evidence of cinema’s prehistory and are also consulted as documents in the history of technology.^*17 From a critical perspective, Marey’s photographs were not intended as aesthetic expression. Yet their treatment of the body as a measurable pattern of movement laid foundations for later body science, sports measurement, and image analysis, while raising questions about the modern gaze that treats the body as information.^*18 Scholarly studies published by OpenEdition and CNRS Éditions do not confine Marey’s work to the history of technology. They examine it in relation to the formation of modern concepts of the body, demonstrating continued critical interest.^*19 The National Gallery of Canada’s Study in Motion by Chronophotography shows how Marey’s photography has also become established within museum collections as a work of art.^*20

At the same time, the history of bodily measurement cannot be understood solely as a neutral story of technological progress. Marta Braun and Elizabeth Whitcombe compare photographs of pathological locomotion by Marey, Muybridge, and Albert Londe in the context of late nineteenth-century neurological research, examining how clinical medicine used sequential photographs to classify visible abnormalities of the body.^*29 The ability to measure movement served both to explain the workings of the normal body and to support institutions that visually distinguished the “normal” from the “pathological.” Any account of Marey’s place in photographic history must therefore consider the observational and classificatory gaze of modern medicine alongside his representations of time that led toward cinema.