Early Photography

Etienne-Jules Marey
Etienne-Jules Marey : a passion for the trace / François Dagognet
Marey, seeking to characterize the body of animals in motion through time, found inspiration in the new field of physical transcription devices: literating blood pressure, sound, etc. Photography has the disadvantage of not being aprismatic in time, flattening their entire exposure into a temporal blur.

"Marey made it possible for the avant-garde to become receptive to new values: instead of escape into the past, the unreal or the dream, there was the double cult of machines and their propulsion [...]" (148) inspiring Giacomo Balla & Luigi Russolo, Marinetti, and ultimately Duchamp (1912 Nude Decending a Staircase)

"He was obliged to revise his recording methods (myographs, hodographs, dynamagraphs, simultaneous polygraphs, and so on) until he arrived at "optical-electrical capture," which gradually replaced the "mechanical" kind." (175)

"Mareyism contained within it, perhaps unwittingly, the foundations of the modern world it foreshadowed: the signals and fluxes, the multiple tele-inscriptions, the long-range controls and sensitive recorders and, more obviously, travel in the air (airplanes) and underwater; the capacity to preserve traces; abstract art and the crucial domain of audiovisual communication." (163)

-- it was the unique ability to encode and transmit huge amounts of information that allowed for this powerful compression that foreshadowed the whole of the modern world.

Contrast between two horse images: "A track was painted with light crosswise bands alternating with wide black areas. These divisions helped locate, measure, and assess distance traveled and speed, since the time taken was known (chronobiology)." (104)
-- What is really at stake here is the measuribility of discrete time in the photographs. He has already, by discretizing the exposure, provided for the segmentation of the image; this applies labels to that discretization.

Picturing time : the work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) / Marta Braun
Points to the telephone (1876) and wireless telegraph (1894), and the Prime Meridian Conference (1884) as prior transformations in the consideration of time. (p. 278) "And while Sigmund Freud investigated the importance of the personal past and its existence in the present, an even more direct access to the past was given through photography and the phonograph." (Braun 278)

"Underlying Marey's need to grasp and measure was a view of reality as constituted by discrete functions, invisible matter that could be probed and analyzed by the instruments he devised. Bergson's view was, of course, just the opposite: the solid contours of the closely knit images we call the material world, he said, are only a necessary invention of our senses. In reality, matter is in the flux of constant becoming." (279)

Bergson: "But with these positions, even with an infinite number of them, we shall never make movement. They are not parts of the movement, they are so many snapshots of it; they are, one might say, only supposed stopping-places. The moving body is never really in any of the points; the most we can say is that it passes through them." (280-1)
-- this is a fallacious argument: from elementary analysis, we know we can derive continuous functions from the limit points of compact sets. The critical error is a misunderstanding of the concept of an "infinite number" of such positions.

"artists who wished to give form to the new experience of time Bergson so articulately voiced were drawn to Marey's pictures. They were an irresistible and particularly fecund visual source. For artists the attraction of the photographs lay in one important particular: they were the first images to effectively rupture the perspectival code that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. Marey's pictures depicted chronological succession within a single frame. Chronophotography provided a language for representing simultaneity - what was popularly understood to be Bergson's idea of time." (Braun 281)

Others influenced by Marey: Frantisek Kupka, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, and finally Antonio Giulio Bragaglia: "With photodynamism, we have freed photography from the indecency of its brutal realism, and from the craziness of instantaneity, which, considered to be a scientific fact only because it was a mechanical product, was accepted as absolutely correct." (299)