The working body: physical education (2)

Marey’s science of the human motor even changed how the working body was conceived and how it was represented in the social domain. The first application of chronophotography devoted to establishing optimum work performance with specific tools was undertaken in Marey’s laboratory by Charles Fremont in 1894. It was followed by others in Europe, as Marey’s graphing and photographing instruments became the tools of the trade to decompose worker’s movements and to record postures, pauses, gestures, choice of tools, compare skilled and unskilled workers’ movements, even to rationalize a physiological basis for psychology. A new European science of work emerged out of Marey’s analyses. It was based on the unquestioned belief that the physical and mental well being of workers was the foundation for the wealth and productivity of the nation. But this belief was idealistic, as events in America would show. There at the beginning of the 20th century, Marey’s decomposition of motion was complicit in the work of Frederick Taylor and his managerial associates. Working on behalf of the owner, not the worker, they increased productivity by removing control of the work process from the worker and placing it in the hands of Taylor’s time-and-motion-study engineers. Here is an image made by the most important of Taylor’s associates, Frank Bunker Gilbreth. Infatuated with the promise that system and standardization would impose order upon the inefficient and disorderly world of labour, Gilbreth deployed his cameras as a mechanical solution to the problems of subjective observation, reconfiguring the body’s movements to make them more efficient – and more profitable to the owner.

Chronocyclegraph of an experienced handkerchief folder, ten cycles. Photo 618-G70-1, N file 11/0031-7. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth Collection, Purdue University Libraries. Special Collections.