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Image and Graph: Marey’s Chronophotography

Park Sangwoo 1

1중부대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to reveal the multiple sens of the chronophotography that Etienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist in 19th century, invented to analyze the animal locomotion. Marey, unlike Eadweard Muybridge, was not simply a photography or artist, but a famous scientist in those days. He was interested in analyzing the animal locomotion, as he put it, the langage of life itself. In order to study the mouvement of animal, he invented the graphic method which recorded the motion of the body without using human observation and hands. However, Marey knew that his graphic method could not represent the complex relationships that occurred between one body part and each of the others at the same time. After seeing the sequence of photographs of galloping horses taken by Muybridge, Marey adopted the photographical method in place of the graphic method. In 1882, He invented the technique of chronophotography in which he used one camera, one sensitive plate. Marey dressed a man all in white and had him move in front of a total black background. Marey created a sequence of images in a single sensitive plate. But the chronophotography had one important limit. The photographs are taken so close together that they interfere with one another and produce the confused effect. To avoid this confusion, Marey takes picture of not the entire body of the subject, but only certain lines or points whose position is significant of the facts that he desires to know. Eventually, in Marey's chronophotography the body is reduced to the geometrical elements, lines and points. The body, the real, the phenomena become the most abstract representation. By using a graphical chronophotography, Marey returns to his early method, graphical method. Graph, line, schematism, abstraction are the key concepts in Marey's scientific method.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.