Coined by the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey in the 1880s to describe his photographs of movement that often included a timing clock in the frame so that he could make accurate physiological analyses of movements, the term was later applied to many types of sequential images. Scientists began making single-plate chronophotographs, where a sequence of multiple overlapping images was recorded on a single plate, in the late 1850s when Bernhard Feddersen measured the duration of an electric spark. Multiple-plate chronophotography, where separate phases of movement were recorded on a series of individual photographic plates, at first by using a battery of separate cameras, was introduced by Eadweard Muybridge for his celebrated project of photographing Governor Stanford's racehorses in 1878. At the cutting edge of photographic technology in the later 19th century, new developments were widely discussed in the photographic press and initiated many non-scientific experiments, since the phases of movement captured by chronophotographic methods could be reproduced as an illusion of natural movement in a stroboscopic viewer like a zoetrope or phenakistoscope. Before 1898 many early moving-picture cameras and projectors were patented and discussed under the rubric of new chronophotographic apparatus.
The four main figures of chronophotography, Muybridge, Marey, Ottomar Anschütz, and Georges Demeny, for each of whom the claim ‘inventor of the cinema’ has been advanced, had widely divergent careers and attitudes towards their serial images. Although his extraordinary accomplishment in making sequences of twelve wet-plate images of Stanford's horses in various gaits was hailed in photographic journals worldwide after June 1878, Muybridge reinforced his reputation by lecturing on his work as early as a month later. He toured Europe in 1881-2, America in 1882-3, Europe again in 1889-92, and built an attraction at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. In his lectures, Muybridge projected drawings carefully modelled on the phases of movement revealed by his series photographs on a device called the zoopraxiscope—a ‘magic lantern run mad’ according to the Illustrated London News—but his only photographic disc for the apparatus used posed individual images of the skeleton of a horse galloping. Both Muybridge's startling work and his relentless promotion of it inspired others to take up his expensive photographic methods.
Marey, who published extensively on aspects of movement, flight, and exercise, began using photographic methods for his research in 1882, at first fixing overlapping phases on a single plate and by 1888 using 1 metre (3 ft) strips of unperforated celluloid with separate, irregularly placed images. An unsurpassed analyst of human, animal, and bird locomotion, he had little interest in reproducing movement, although he sometimes fitted a photograph series into a zoetrope to check its reliability by reconstituting the original movement. Demeny, his assistant from 1882 to 1894, made major contributions to Marey's photographic experiments and envisioned wider applications of the stroboscopic reproduction of movement, particularly in devising a disc-based viewer called the Phonoscope in 1892 that served as either a peepshow or a simple projector. After they split up in 1894, Demeny established his own laboratory, where he improved Marey's camera, developed pioneering projection apparatus, and made short films. Anschütz, who started taking series of chronophotographs in 1885, produced a disc-based viewer the following year he called the ‘Schnellseher’, which used his photographs to reproduce natural movement as a public entertainment. Over the next decade, nine successive models were exhibited in Europe and North America, but an overambitious business plan ultimately collapsed just before Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope peepshow machine reached the public.
Whether directly or indirectly, each of these four major chronophotographers made important conceptual, technical, and practical contributions to the establishment of moving pictures in the mid-1890s, and the work of each was well known, sometimes in great detail, by moving-picture inventors and pioneers like Edison, the Lumière brothers, Max Skladanowsky, Léon Gaumont, George William de Bedts, and others. At the same time, chronophotographic methods were used by other figures for a variety of purposes. Ernst Kohlrausch in Hanover used series photographs from 1890 in the training of gymnasts, ultimately building two cameras and two projectors for both the analysis and reconstitution of athletic movements. From 1882 Albert Londe in Paris applied his nine-image apparatus and a later twelve-image camera to analysing involuntary movements of epileptic patients and the muscular movements of a tightrope walker and a blacksmith. Colonel Hippolyte Sébert, an occasional collaborator of Londe, applied chronophotography to the study of ballistics after 1889. Victor von Reitzner in Vienna produced chronophotographic apparatus for open-air photography of natural subjects in 1891 whose unusual technology was directly taken over by the French moving-picture pioneer de Bedts in Paris in early 1896. In Philadelphia, the Realist painter Thomas Eakins made photographic studies for his large-scale canvases from 1884 with a Marey-style camera. A number of independent inventors were inspired by chronophotographic work to seek improved means of reproducing movement, including Augustin le Prince and Wordsworth Donisthorpe in Britain; Gray and Otway Latham, C. Francis Jenkins, Thomas Armat, and Herman Casler in the USA; and Henri Joly in France. After 1896 chronophotography disappeared as a separate photographic technique and its analytic methods were quickly subsumed into specialist, often high-speed, moving-picture work by scientists like Marey's successor in Paris, Lucien Bull, or the American efficiency experts Frank Gilbreath and F. W. Taylor.
— Deac Rossell
Bibliography
- Darius, J., Beyond Vision (1984).
- Poivert, M., et al., La Révolution de la photographie instantanée, 1880-1900 (1996).
- Braun, M., “‘The Expanded Present: Photographing Movement’”, in A. Thomas (ed.), Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science (1997)
