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Etienne-Jules Marey, Physiologist (18301904)
A contemporary of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules
Marey was not a photographer. His field was physiology, a relatively new
science of the human body that allowed him to indulge his love of physics
and engineering. Marey considered the body an animate machine, subject
to the same laws as inanimate machines, and he dedicated his life to analyzing
the laws that governed its movements.
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The publication of Muybridges
photographs in Paris started Marey on a quest to make a camera that would
picture movement as well as chart it. Muybridges multicamera system
wasnt scientific enough for Marey. By 1882, he developed a single
camera method that he called chrono-, or time-, photography. Objective
and precise, chrono-photography allowed Marey to make images from which
scientific measurements could be taken.
Early in his career, Marey modified
graphing instruments used in physics to chart movements inside the body
such as the heartbeat, as well as the bodys external motions.
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Animal Mechanism, 1872
Etienne-Jules Marey
Lent by Smithsonian Libraries |