Vintage Athletes - Part 46

Étienne-Jules Marey

We've seen the stop-motion photography of Edweard Muybridge.  But Muybridge was not the only photographer trying to capture motion before the invention of the movie camera.  Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), above, was a French scientist who, among other things, studied the flight of birds and the movement of animals.

Marey's 1873 book La Machine Animale (Animal Mechanism) stated that a galloping horse briefly had all four hooves off the ground, but he had no way to prove this.  Using an array of 12 cameras that were electrically triggered, Muybridge was able to photograph the racehorse Sallie Gardner belonging to Leland Stanford, the former Governor of California, proving Marey's conjecture correct (above).

In 1878, Marey wrote to the French scientific magazine La Nature: "I am lost in admiration over the instantaneous photographs of Mr. Muybridge, which you published in the last issue of La Nature. Can you put me in correspondence with the author? I want to beg his aid and support to solve certain physiological problems so difficult to solve by other methods."

Marey eventually produced his own chronophotographic camera in 1882.  The one above dates from 1883.  Unlike Muybridge's technique of using separate cameras to take photos in sequence, Marey's camera had a spinning disk in the front with slit-like openings that exposed the film as the disk spun.  In this way, multiple successive images were captured on a single piece of film.

Here's an example of the result, showing a flying pelican in 1882.

Marey was more interested in animals than humans, but he did take some photos of athletes in motion.  Most were clothed, but a couple were nude, including the one above, called Chronophotographie d'un Coureur (Time photography of a Runner).  Click on it for a larger image.

Here's another nude runner.  This one is called La Course de L'Homme (The Race of Man).  Click on it for a larger image.

Marey's technique of exposing multiple images on one piece of film was taken up by American artist and photographer Thomas Eakins, who was much more interested in photographing naked men than Marey was.  We'll see his work later in this series.