Chronophotography

Chronophotography is an antique photographic technique from the Victorian era (beginning about 1867–68), which captures movement in several frames of print. These prints can be subsequently arranged either like animation cels or layered in a single frame. It is a predecessor to cinematography and moving film, involving a series of different cameras, originally created and used for the scientific study of movement. Chronophotography is an antique photographic technique from the Victorian era (beginning about 1867–68), which captures movement in several frames of print. These prints can be subsequently arranged either like animation cels or layered in a single frame. It is a predecessor to cinematography and moving film, involving a series of different cameras, originally created and used for the scientific study of movement. Chronophotography is defined as 'a set of photographs of a moving object, taken for the purpose of recording and exhibiting successive phases of motion'. The term chronophotography was coined by French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey to describe photographs of movement from which measurements could be taken and motion could be studied. It is derived from the Greek word χρόνος chrónos ('time') combined with photography. Photography is an art and science which was invented and developed beginning in the 1830s. Initially, it was used as a documentation device – for portraiture, historical moments, battles in war, and so on. With how rapidly the technological and artistic world began to develop, new uses and ideas for the camera also began to develop. With the invention of the camera, art no longer necessarily had to capture life. The camera became the dominant source of accurate depiction of life. As the technology became more sophisticated, so did the activities for which people needed cameras. The earliest Daguerreotype photographers already took multiple shots of a subject, mostly to increase their chances of obtaining a successful picture. Making multiple shots of one subject was also a sensible solution when multiple pictures were needed, since Daguerreotypes could not be reproduced (except by photographing an existing Daguereotype). At least from the early 1840s some photographers used multiple cameras, resulting in series of pictures with small differences in time and/or angle. However, changes in poses or angles between exposures were usually aimed at the most advantageous look for the model. Those were not the slight and regular changes needed for a chronophotographic sequence. In 1844 Antoine Claudet exhibited some 'portraits multiples' at l'Exposition, including a self portrait series of twelve pictures showing his face from the left side profile to the right side profile. He had made the pictures in London in 1843 with a simple multiplier device that allowed successive exposures of parts of Daguerreotype plates in a very short time. Claudet regarded these pictures as curious specimens of photography of little practical use and forgot about it. After the Mayer brothers patented a 'multiplicateur' in 1850 Claudet contested the priority of their invention. In 1853 André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri popularized the multiplier through the mass production of cartes de visite. As early as the 1850s, some photographers were making “moving pictures” by taking photographs of a subject in a series of poses simulating phases of motion, then using various devices to display them one after the other in rapid succession. English instrument maker Francis Herbert Wenham (or possibly a lesser known Frederic Wenham) would claim in 1895 that he had already made a series of ten stereoscopic images to be viewed on two phenakistiscopes in 1852. In 1861 American engineer Coleman Sellers II received US patent No. 35,317 for the kinematoscope, a device that exhibited 'stereoscopic pictures as to make them represent objects in motion'. In his application he stated: 'This has frequently been done with plane pictures buthas never been, with stereoscopic pictures'. He used three sets of stereoscopic photographs in a sequence with some duplicates to regulate the flow of a simple repetitive motion, but also described a system for very large series of pictures of complicated motion. A pixilation type of photography was necessary because the photographic materials available at that time were not sensitive enough to permit the very short exposures needed to photograph subjects that were actually moving. Improvements in the sensitivity of photographic emulsions eventually made real-time chronophotography possible. In 1872, Leland Stanford, former governor of California and horse enthusiast, hired Eadweard Muybridge to provide photographic proof that at some instants a galloping horse has all four hooves off the ground. Muybridge lined part of a racecourse with a row of cameras that had shutters connected to a series of tripwires, then photographed a horse against a white background as it galloped past. One of the resulting silhouette photographs provided the desired proof. Later in the decade, with the benefit of more sensitive photographic plates, he obtained greatly improved results. Muybridge also arranged such sequences of photographs in order around the inner surface of a zoetrope; when the drum-like device was set spinning, an observer looking through its slots saw an animated image. Muybridge's first chronophotographic sequence is known as Sallie Gardner at a Gallop. The images of the horse caused astonishment to the public, as no one had seen such precise documentation of the movement of the animal. Muybridge was subsequently commissioned to photograph a variety of other moving subjects. Later, in 1878, Albert Londe was hired as a medical photographer by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Londe used a camera with nine lenses and intricate timing system to study the physical and muscular movements of patients. Over time Londe refined this system to be able to take a sequence of twelve pictures in as little as a tenth of a second.