albumen print, mounted to light green board, titled by the photographer in ink and numbered 'No 123' by him in pencil on the mount, matted, framed, circa 1886

Private Collection

Acquir🐬ed by the Quillan Company from the above, 1989

Jill Quasha, The Quillan Collection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs (New York, 1991), pl. 13 (this print)

Grading this albumen print on a scale of 1 to 10 - a 10 being an albumen print that has deep brown dark tones and highlights that retain all of their original detail - this print rates a 6. The print's dark tones are somewhat light overall, and this may simply have to do with the way the photograph was printed rather than being a consequence of fading. When the print is examined very closely in raking light, some faint isolated scuffs are visible throughout, as is a tiny indentation on the right portion of the bottom edge. The print's lower left corner has lifted from the mount slightly. A faint area of craquelure is visible along the left edge. The print is mounted to green paper that has light soiling and faint age-darkening at the extremities. The ink inscription is still bold.
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Physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey was already famous for his research into blood circulation and human and animal locomotion when he read about Eadweard Muybridge's photographic motion studies in La Nature in December 1878.  The two men began a correspondence that would prompt Marey to use photography in his physiologica𝕴l research, creating some of the most captivating images of the nineteenth century. 

In 1883, Marey designed a fi🎉xed-plate chronophotograph camera that was capable of capturing sequential images of a single movement on a single photographic plate.  The camera and the limited sensitivity of the materials of the day required that subjects wear white--as in this image--and be strongly lit during movement in front of a dark background.  Marey and Muybridge workeꦇd along parallel paths, but the visual effect of the two photographers' output is significant; whereas Muybridge's work shows the movement of his subject in a sequence of photographs, Marey's studies show a range of motion captured in one image.  

Marey's work remains modern well over a century after it was made.&nbsꦇp; His concept of compressing a span of time into a single photograph is evident in the work of the pioneering Futurists Anton and Arturo Bragaglia, and provided the foundation for Harold Edgerton's explorations into stroboscopi⛦c photography in the 1930s.