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The fusil photographique (2)
Although modeled on Janssen's gun, Marey's version of the instrument was faster and more flexible. In Janssen's revolver, an impression was made when the light was allowed through one slot of a continually rotating slotted disk shutter to the single fixed slot behind it. Ingeniously, Marey reversed the two shutters and fixed the plate to the hindmost. Shutter and plate moved and stopped together, and the three revolving elements were reduced to two. Marey also solved the problem of plate storage and accessibility. He devised a plate carrier - he called it his "conjurer's box"* - which held 25 plates and dispensed them, one at a time, without their ever being exposed to light. There were, nevertheless, profound differences between the camera's way of capturing motion and that of the graphing instruments which Marey hoped it would supplant. The graphing inscriptors did not make pictures of the movements they were tracing; rather they furnished Marey with a fluid visual expression for time and motion. The lines which undulated without interruption across a piece of smoke- blackened paper were a kind of writing whose language, as Marey put it, was that of life itself. From this writing he could make interpretations and he could measure; he could calculate the force of the movement and the work expended in executing it; each surge, squiggle and loop was deciphered by him like an "archeologist....deciphering inscriptions traced in an unknown language,... [who tries], turn by turn, several different meanings for each sign.." **
The camera depicted movement in quite a different way; it actually made a picture of the changes that occurred in instants in time, reproducing the outward form of the movement attended by a profusion of pictorial detail. Its reproduction was intermittent, however, and it represented sequential moments in time without the moments in between. The rendering of movement in time as a continuous fluid passage was lost. The graphic method had given movement as a continuity, moving with the movement, echoing its every displacement; but it did so at the cost of concrete detail. The camera provided pictures with as much concrete detail as one would wish; but it did so at the cost of continuity and clear expression.

* Marey. - Le fusil photographique. In : La nature : revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l'industrie, 1882,22 avril, p. 326-330.
** Marey, « Natural history of organized bodies. From the course of lectures of M. Marey at the College of France ». In : Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (…) for the year 1867 : p. 285