Lot 38: Etienne-Jules Marey , 1830-1904 'trajectoire parabolique d'une boule lancée à la main' (parabolic trajectory of a ball thrown by hand)

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

measurements note 2¾ by 6½ in. (7 by 16.5 cm.)

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

Private CollectionAcquired by the Quillan Company from the above, 1989

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 physiological research, creating some of the most captivating images of the nineteenth century. In 1883, Marey designed a fixed-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 worked 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. 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 stroboscopic photography in the 1930s.