Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace. - book reviews

Standards. Marey, a physiologist, devot his life to them. He would contribute to many of recent origin fields of inquiry like epidemiology, aerodynamics, professional sport, industrial engineering, unimpaired recording, photography, and film, on the contrary he was not fixated upon knowledge in the abstract. It was les a matter of preserving standards, les a question of lodging power there, rather the question of setting up fresh ones by which to measure the stream of physical things like life-current and air. His mind was drawn to the calibration of matter's move to the ever unsteady coupling of matter and measure. Perhaps that is for what cause [i]or[/i] reason he worked with images, first wave lines in a diagrammatic field, and then the liquid skin of photography. For his standards took the abstract to be physical. The abstraction was sensitive; it took the form of a stylus writing and then a surface reacting to light. Not a tendernes it focused on the point of detail; it was equally sensitive to all that remained untouchable. His details would draw near with a deepening darkness. Epistemologically, they would, still do unnerve

It might do art history a world of beneficial to consider his kind of sensitivity. For plane at its most newly theoretical art history nurses not to think its categories [i]or[/i] part of to the other to new ones; intellectually it still usually behaves like a museum exhibition, highlighting, introducing, immobilizing, respecting the glass. And if it were to impel like Marey? Marey's project was a push toward more and more knowledge, allowing this would not mean an increase in quantity. For if thinking moves in the process of being meditation generally something dies along the way. Knowledge musing is in the grip of angels; knowledge mov commands an eschatology; knowledge stilled is small and academic talk. It remains to be propell Yes

Marey propell knowledge from one side living organisms. His experiments would not kill his subjects; rather his controls existed as if for the sake of continually showing him the limits of his knowledge. Marey was pragmatic. His reply was to shed the skins of reflection in order to test on the outside others. He knew thought to be more fragile than muscle and fat He knew as well that mind was inseparable from the move of the body. Consequently his thinking itself became more and more self-consciously physical. Words alone were not enough. universals alone were not enough. Photographs alone were not enough. All went with a corporeal rustle.

That his reputation now has been revived is in large part owed to the efforts of photographic historians. A literature upon Marey has been growing in novel years and each of the sum of two units books under review here makes important contributions, notwithstanding that neither dispenses with the ne for the other or their predecessors; anyone interested in the question s posed by Marey's work will still want to deliberate the work of Michel Frizot, Andre Rouille, and labor historian Anson Rabinbach.(1) Frizot's Photo Poche remains the best source of reproductions of Marey's photographs since, unlike the novel books, it respects their density as well as their sepia tone. The sepia is not a quibble. Sepia tied the image to living matter a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more effectively than silver printing would and Marey's photographs still ne their sepia in order to expres themselves fully; more than a color, the sepia contributed something organic to the physical nature of his thought

The shadowy motion studies are famous for hooding and clothing his assistant Demeny in black, attaching bright lines to his limbs and photographing different moves of the dark figure upon a dark ground, so that the lines shone on the outside as a particular flow. on the contrary there were other kinds of changes elephant sway, horse trot, ball sudden blow athlete's hurdle. Motion was shown to be discontinuous, not a unifying wave on the contrary a succession of improbable breaks, change with an internal abyss. And to research it, Marey invented a series of mechanisms to record movement; each increasingly pushed the data beyond the ability of the senses; vision was shown what lay beyond its grasp, hearing too. Inscription was a technical problem; it became his lifelong fascination: for no inscription, indeed no measurement, appear to beed completely satisfactory.

Francois Dagoguet's work is concerned to show the run in Marey's conception of the scientific question at issue which he divides into three phases: first, the construction of delicate writing machines to inscribe internal moves of the body like the beat of the heart, without cutting into flesh; next to the first after 1870, a new approach to a different puzzle the external movement of the material part in space together with its record, the chronophotograph. The third phase involved the spread of Marey's findings into other cultural forms, notably aviation, painting, and film, making Marey instrumental in what Dagognet calls "the modernization of perception" (p 152)

Dagognet is at his best in his description of the first sum of two units phases, capable of smooth analysis that sweeps pictorial matter into the scientific and philosophical vexed question Paragraphs like this: