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| Marey. Pelican in Flight. Image sourced from http://nickgarrettfeed-noise.blogspot.com/2010/09/etienne-jules-marey.html |
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www.expo-marey.com |
I was thinking about Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962). I thought of Bachelard when I remembered it was Étienne Marey's birthday the other day. Marey is of course one of the giants of cinematography, and the guy who proved a cat always lands on its feet.
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www.expo-marey.com |
Bachelard contested histories of continuity, instead proposing a view of the history and philosophy of science as a dis continuum characterized by a series of epistemological breaks, like the recent one between relativistic and quantum physics. "Man", he said, "is an imagining being", and "The words of the world want to make sentences." (La Poetique De La Reverie:1960) Bachelard said a lot of things. He also wrote "A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition". (Water and Dreams:1942). But that's another story.
Étienne Marey (1830-1904) invented the Fusil Photographique, or the Photographic Gun in 1881, a gun-like stock and barrel mechanism, not unlike a modern rifle, that exposed twelve consecutive pictures a second on a circular revolving dry photographic plate. Marey went on to invent the modern portable movie camera in 1890, using George Eastman's 9cm x 9cm gelatin film.
With his high speed photographic rifles Marey shot sequences of the natural world in motion; of galloping horses, insects' wings flying, cats landing on their feet and most memorably, a pelican landing. At the moment physics turned to atomic theory to explain the natural world, Marey atomized its movement.
Bachelard commented that science has turned from the study of things to the study of relationships. Along with atomic science he may have had Marey's movies in mind. When the atomic bombs exploded over Japan in the summer of 1945 their flash left imprints of the natural world in frozen moments, like Marey's Pelican, in stone.
Anyhow. Gratz Étienne Marey, whose high speed photography irrevocably changed what we see. And how we see it.
It would be nice if you acknowledged the source of the photographs that you have included in this post.
ReplyDeleteBlogger won't let me put the photographs in a particular place where they can be captioned, and the text didn't end up under the photographs. Must be Mac incompatibilities, I can't see any way to fix it. Perhaps you could take a look at the formatting for me.
ReplyDeleteI found one site with the Marey image, same image may be found at
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne-Jules_Marey
I think that now you should be able to insert captions underneath other two images, if you go into edit. :)
Thanks. It seems I have a different view of the control panel, just looking at blogger help. Perhaps that is a permissions issue, or just x-platform vagaries. No drama, I'll email you the captions later on.
ReplyDelete