Étienne-Jules Marey

Etienne-Jules Marey approached photography through physiology. He needed a way to record movement too rapid for the naked eye, and after seeing Muybridge's work he adopted photography as a scientific instrument^*1. Unlike Muybridge, he tried to register an entire trajectory on a single plate, leading to the chronophotographic gun of 1882. Its layered images of birds, walking bodies, and animals converted time into visible form^*2. That approach shaped later artistic representations of motion and also belongs to the broader prehistory of cinema and modern motion study^*1.