Etienne-Jules Marey ’s decomposition of movement was
astonishingly influential in a number of disciplines. First he
succeeded in mechanically graphing the movements within and of
the body. He triggered a revolution in medicine by creating the
means to translate invisible life functions, like the beat of
the heart, into a visible and legible form. All the electrical
graphing machines in hospitals today - electrocardiographs,
encephelographs and oscilloscopes - derive from graphing
instruments Marey devised more than a century ago.
Then, using the same principles as he created with his
graphic method, Marey honed the photographic camera into a
scientific instrument to analyze the motion of humans and of the
animals with whom they share this planet. Wilbur Wright himself
suggested Marey’s importance to aviation when he wrote that
without Marey's study of the flight of birds he and Orville
would have never taken to the air. The reform of the French army
after the defeat of 1871 was based on Marey's photographic study
of the physiology of soldiers. For anyone studying the birth of
motion pictures, Marey’s work is crucial, the source of both
Edison's and the Lumière Brothers' later inventions. Marey was
the first to use motion pictures as training materials for
athletes, but this is only one of a number of important
contributions he made to the history of physical education and
gymnastics. And finally, the European science of work was
founded on his studies of the body at work.
By putting on line part of the more than 2000 negatives
housed in the Collège de France, the BIUM has allowed us see for
the first time the breadth and the depth of Marey’s photographic
and cinematographic investigations. The negatives, transferred
on the site into positives, were found under the roof at the
Institut Marey in 1979 as it was being demolished to make way
for the expansion of Roland Garros. The images from the earliest
experiments Marey undertook with his préparateur Georges Demenÿ
to the last pictures made a few years before he died. The plates
have been arranged here in chronological order and by experiment
(experience).