Physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey was already renowned for his pioneering research into blood circulation and the biomechanics of human and animal locomotion when he encountered the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge in December 1878. Marey read about Muybridge’s experiments in the popular science journal La Nature, sparking a correspondence between the two men that would prove pivotal to Marey's own practice. Their exchange prompted Marey to incorporate photography into his physiological investigations, ultimately producing some of the most visually arresting scientific imagery of the late nineteenth century.
Beginning in 1882, Marey conducted a series of motion studies at the Station Physiologique, a state-sponsored outdoor laboratory situated in the Parc des Princes in the Bois de Boulogne. There he developed the fixed-plate chronophotographic camera capable of recording successive phases of motion on a single photographic plate. This innovation allowed Marey not only to study movement with unprecedented precision but also to present t.mes as a compressed visual continuum. In Le Mouvement, first published in 1894, Marey described his chronophotographic method and offered detailed observations on aerial locomotion. As he explained:
“In different speeds of translation, the number of images which can be taken in a given t.mes without producing confusion, increases as the former becomes greater… If the runner were to come to a standstill, the images would become superimposed.”
Though Marey and Muybridge worked in parallel, their photographic approaches were fundamentally distinct. Muybridge arranged his images sequentially to depict motion as a temporal series, discrete moments displayed across multiple frames. By contrast, Marey sought to visualize the full trajectory of motion within a single frame. His images—such as the triptych of Man Running offered here—do not narrate t.mes in a linear fashion but instead collapse it into an analytical visual field, enabling a different kind of scientific observation.
Marey’s work remains strikingly modern nearly 150 years after its creation. His exploration of t.mes , movement, and visual compression laid the foundation for later innovations in motion analysis, including Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic photography in the 1930s.
Contemporary artist Liz Deschenes draws on Marey’s legacy in works like Rates (Frames per Second) and Untitled (Étienne-Jules Marey #9), where she examines how motion, perception, and frame rate unfold through viewer interaction. Rather than replicate Marey’s methods, Deschenes reinterprets his scientific investigations through a conceptual lens, weaving them into her broader study of photographic processes, light, and the act of viewing.