| Marey's
Photography & Movement Links Etienne Jules Marey, both a physician and physiologist, began his his fascination with movement first through his discoveries in circulation and blood pressure, creating external instruments to record and explore the inner-workings of the body. This early work inspired Marey to explore the movement of the body itself, through time and space, as an integrated whole comprised of linked parts subject to and agents of universal physical laws. He nurtured the art of capturing cycles of movement through time in a single frame. His images and explorations varied from the straightforward--a man jumping--to the thoughtfully experimental--runners clothed in black with white ping pong balls attached to their joints, exposing sine waves in limb motion through space. He first began his studies using wet collodion plates in 1876, later moving on to photographic dry plates in the 1880s upon their introduction. What I find most intriguing about Marey's work is its haunting nature. In his images we see time and space collapsing in upon itself, converging before our eyes, frozen in a single frame. In his studies involving people clothed in black with white highlighted body areas or segments, we see the the biological manifestations of the science that governs our internal processes in the photographic ghost of the re-occurring patterns we find in and explain our physical world with--e.g. the sine wave. Submitted
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