Marey could not render time and space, the two characteristics of movement, with equal emphasis. If he wanted the muscular forms clearly represented, he had to record the phases of the movement more slowly, creating gaps. If he wanted to increase the number of images to render the temporal element more vividly, then the increased speed would result in confusing superimposition. The way he resolved this problem was to operate against our usual understanding of photography, that cameras inherently replicate all detail visible to the eye, that photography is the guarantor of the visible. For it was precisely the surfeit of detail frozen by Marey's camera that was obscuring what he wanted really to see - the clear expression, or, we could say visualization, of movement. It was the camera's duplication of the seeming normalcy of vision that Marey had to supersede in order to find the vision beyond sight. Operating on the subject (the Georges Demenÿ) this time, rather than the camera, he eliminated the confusing superimposition, first by covering the offending limbs in black velvet,

1883 - Chronophotographie locomotion de l'homme

and then by covering the whole body in black and marking its joints in white. Now he had pure movement detached from the performer, conveyed in a graphic form, and a photographic image totally without precedent. Marey called the method chronophotography. *

1883 - Chronophotographie géométrique locomotion de l'homme

* Marey continued to test other systems that were variations on his basic principle of displacing the onward movements of a subject onto a successive part of a single plate in a single camera. First, and perhaps most obviously, he tried producing separate instantaneous pictures by moving the plate horizontally behind the lens. In the examples which survive from this experiment (which, are all of athletes and gymnasts, suggesting Demenÿ's hand in the experiment), the distance between one phase and another is so great that the individual images are of distinct poses, not phases of a single movement. Marey left no record of how he moved the plate, and the experiment was short lived.