Picture After Picture: The Art of Chronophotography

By Hannah Brown, Chloe LaMonica, and Troy Parker

Muybridge, Eadweard, 1830-1904. Horse in Motion (Horse with Sulky). 1878. Visual Arts Legacy Collection. Artstor. https://jstor.org/stable/community.13877753.

 

Chronophotography is the process of taking multiple high-speed photographs of a rapid movement, with each photograph being taken at brief and equal frame intervals to capture movement, which to the unaided human eye are imperceptible. This process was originally accomplished with a hand cranked camera that had a metal plate that revolved vertically against a slit disk, grazing the plate’s shutter. And each slit would create a photograph. Chronophotography emerged in the late 19^th century, around 1878, when Étienne-Jules Marey pioneered the work of using photography to study the flight of birds. His work was then followed by Eadweard Muybridge, who captured locomotion and the running horse, which is the famous series of photos titled “The Horse in Motion”. This was an important photographic experiment in the early history of film and animation.

Chronophotography used a series of instantaneous photographs, taken at brief and equal intervals of time, to record forms of movement that are otherwise indiscernible to the naked human eye. The process employed different mechanics to capture motion, such as Marey’s chronophotographic gun, which put the camera in a shotgun-type contraption so that pulling the trigger, Marey’s chronophotographic gun would produce a series of photographs. Marey’s chronophotographic gun is an early mechanical device that was built off an astronomical revolver created in 1874 by a French astronomer named Pierre Jules César Janssen, who worked in the same process to photograph stars and planets. Some other ways that they did this were by using multiple cameras from different angles to capture the subject, or multiple cameras in a straight line that are sequenced at the same distance from each other. In Muybridge’s camera setup, this was accomplished using a series of strings that would trigger each camera shutter as the subject, such as a horse, moved through the space in front of the cameras. The greatest prior technology that chronophotography largely built upon was instantaneous photography. It was also an innovation from photographing moving things such as animals, waterfalls, and people. The techniques that chronophotography used were to capture the movement of the human body. Animals were also a large subject because photographers wanted to capture a duck’s flight, or the pace of a horse running. The horse also led to the capture of moving locomotives, and the combination of capturing locomotives being pulled by horses was also common.

The word ‘chronophotography’, first used by Étienne-Jules Marey to describe his photographic work on movement, is the process of taking a sequence of pictures to imitate the illusion of movement. Sequential photography was the cutting-edge photography technology between 1878 and the early 1900’s, and was used for scientific purposes by Marey to study the movement of humans and animals, as well as for educational purposes by Ernst Kohlrausch to teach people gymnastic exorcises. Scholars today have viewed chronophotography as the first steps towards the invention of cinema, leaving this artform in the shadows of the world of film, since no one saw any other use for it other than a steppingstone for cinema. It was still of course a very important piece of the puzzle, and it was four people from around the world who pioneeredthis artform;  Muybridge in California, 1878, Marey in Paris, 1882, Georges Demenÿ, who assisted Marey until going on his own two years later, and Ottomar Anschütz in Berlin, in the later 1880’s. While few of them tried to commercialise this artform, that path was pioneered by a man named Ernst Kohlrausch, who used it to show people how to do certain exercises in his German national health and physical exersice newspaper. beyond that, chronophotography was not a popular technology until the invention of cinema, when Muybridge and Thomas Edison created a way to project these images and create narrative worlds. There were other scientists that played with it, like Victor von Rietzner, who he and other small name scientists never really got attention from todays researchers. The whole history of chronophotography, still has people talking about the questions raised before it faded from existence, like why Muybridge never continued on the deveolpment of sequential photography as well as the technologies he made for it. Historians have been baffled by Muybridge’s history, because after the under-performance of devices like his Zoöpraxiscope, he didn’t even take a photograph and only started painting after 1892, historians never knew why. Nonetheless, Muybridge presented multiple phases of motion in one visual sequence which changed how people perceived time, movement, and the body, and his method inspired later artists, filmmakers, and scientists, highlighting his lasting impact on multiple disciplines, and it all started with Muybridge’s invention of chronophotography.

As we live in the 21^st century, the impact of chronophotography can be seen in our daily lives. Different pieces of media including films or just simple videos that we see on our phones via social media are both direct descendants of chronophotography. If not for the work of inventors like Muybridge and Marey, the early cinema would have had a very different beginning, and it would not be what we love and watch today. The actual practice of chronophotography is no longer commonly used, but in the digital era of media, it is being reinvented by some sports photographers who use Photoshop to seamlessly match together a series of action photos into one image creating an edit showing the motion of the athlete, taking what Muybridge created and what Marey did in his early practice to create a new form of art that is being adapted by different photographers across the industry. Within the film world, too, chronophotography left traces on modern-day rotoscoping animation. Films that use CGI practice similar methods as Marey once did to photograph and understand movement, but this time they use it as tracking points to digitally rotoscope over a human actor wearing a special suit. The impact of chronography is large and important, and the modern film landscape wouldn’t be what it is today without it.

 

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