The fusil photographique (2)
Although modeled on Janssen's gun, Marey's version
of the instrument was faster and more flexible. In
Janssen's revolver, an impression was made when the
light was allowed through one slot of a continually
rotating slotted disk shutter to the single fixed slot
behind it. Ingeniously, Marey reversed the two shutters
and fixed the plate to the hindmost. Shutter and plate
moved and stopped together, and the three revolving
elements were reduced to two. Marey also solved the
problem of plate storage and accessibility. He devised a
plate carrier - he called it his "conjurer's box"* -
which held 25 plates and dispensed them, one at a time,
without their ever being exposed to light. |
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There were, nevertheless, profound differences
between the camera's way of capturing motion and that of
the graphing instruments which Marey hoped it would
supplant. The graphing inscriptors did not make pictures
of the movements they were tracing; rather they
furnished Marey with a fluid visual expression for time
and motion. The lines which undulated without
interruption across a piece of smoke- blackened paper
were a kind of writing whose language, as Marey put it,
was that of life itself. From this writing he could make
interpretations and he could measure; he could calculate
the force of the movement and the work expended in
executing it; each surge, squiggle and loop was
deciphered by him like an "archeologist....deciphering
inscriptions traced in an unknown language,... [who
tries], turn by turn, several different meanings for
each sign.." ** |
The camera depicted movement in quite a different way;
it actually made a picture of the changes that occurred
in instants in time, reproducing the outward form of the
movement attended by a profusion of pictorial detail.
Its reproduction was intermittent, however, and it
represented sequential moments in time without the
moments in between. The rendering of movement in time as
a continuous fluid passage was lost. The graphic method
had given movement as a continuity, moving with the
movement, echoing its every displacement; but it did so
at the cost of concrete detail. The camera provided
pictures with as much concrete detail as one would wish;
but it did so at the cost of continuity and clear
expression. *
Marey. - Le fusil photographique. In :
La nature : revue des sciences et de leurs applications
aux arts et à l'industrie, 1882,22 avril, p. 326-330.
** Marey, « Natural history of
organized bodies. From the course of lectures of M.
Marey at the College of France ». In :
Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian
Institution (…) for the year 1867 : p. 285
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