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Introduction (1)

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).