Chronophotography

The best known chronophotography works were mostly intended for the scientific study of locomotion, to discover practical information for animal handlers and/or as reference material for artists.

Chronophotography is defined as "a set of photographs of a moving object, taken for the purpose of recording and exhibiting successive phases of motion".

[1] The term chronophotography was coined by French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey to describe photographs of movement from which measurements could be taken and motion could be studied.

He had made the pictures in London in 1843 with a simple multiplier device that allowed successive exposures of parts of Daguerreotype plates in a very short time.

The earliest known realistic concept of motion picture recording was published by Joseph Plateau, in an 1849 article about improvements for his fantascope.

Without the need to hold poses for a long time, early instantaneous photography eventually made real-time chronophotography possible.

Initially thinking it was impossible, Muybridge nonetheless took the challenge, experimented with chemicals and shutter devices for a while, and eventually managed to shoot a hazy image that satisfied Stanford interest in the actual positions of the legs.

Some years later, Stanford wanted a series to document all the different positions of a running horse and got back to Muybridge for the project.

After initial enthusiasm, physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey became dissatisfied with Muybridge's multiple-camera method and developed the Chronophotographic gun in 1882, inspired by Jules Janssen's photographic revolver.

Georges Demeny, Marey's assistant, developed even further applications for the reproduction of movement, primarily in creating a simple projector called the stroboscope.

He also invented a personal viewer for his chronophotographs, a revolving disk in which the photos could be viewed with illumination from an electric spark (rather than projection).

[2] It was also used for practical purposes, such as judging timed events and recording historical ones (horse and dog races, performances) and studying the movement of projectiles for war.

[11] Due to the development of projection devices (Muybridge's zoopraxiscope, Anschutz's electrotachyscope, and ultimately, Albert Londe's high-speed multi-exposure camera which ran film through a projector in a new way), the display of chronophotographs as entertainment became more sophisticated and useful than ever before.

Romanian neurologist Gheorghe Marinescu made the 1898 film Walking Troubles of Organic Hemiplegy, inspired by his earlier work using chronophotography under the influence of Marey.

The professor called his works "studies with the help of the cinematograph," and published the results, along with several consecutive frames, in issues of "La Semaine Médicale" magazine from Paris, between 1899 and 1902.

[3] Now liberated from the one-to-one relationship between a fixed coordinate in space captured at a single moment in time assumed by classical vanishing-point perspective, the artist became free to explore notions of simultaneity, whereby several positions in space captured at successive time intervals could be depicted within the bounds of a single painting.