Slow publishing
Deeper dialogue
Way of seeing


Publishing

2025

2024


2021
2018 Montana 1: Budapest by Chris Shaw
Montana 0: Carte Blanche by Suffo Moncloa
Walk To The Moon
17 8 176 8 6 (Evidences)

Explore

008
007
006
005
004
003
002
001 Dance
Landscape
Street
Staged Photography II
Staged Photography I
Home
Ritual
Nostalgia

Mentorship (coming soon)

Online
Guest Mentorship

Instagram
Substack  

01. Study

Image Credit: Georges Demeny, Fencer, 1906

Courtesy: Met Museum
Chronophotography
Chronophotography is a photographic technique that produces multiple exposures of a moving subject either on a single frame or in rapid succession to record and analyze motion by capturing its successive phases. The core principles of chronophotography revolve around the superposition of images, where multiple exposures are overlaid on one photographic plate to visualize motion's progression, in contrast to sequential separate images that record each phase on distinct plates. This method relies on short exposure times, often as brief as 1/1000 of a second, to freeze individual motion phases without blur, combined with precise timing mechanisms to ensure equal intervals between exposures for accurate decomposition of movement.



Eadweard Muybridge, Plate Number 187. Dancing (fancy), 1887
Source: National Gallery of Art


Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of human and animal locomotion. Athlete, Standing Leaps, 1879, plate 100 from the series Attitudes of Animals in Motion.
Source: Prodger 2003, p. 137.




Étienne-Jules Marey, Analysis of the Flight of a Pigeon by the Chronophotographic Method 1883-87

Image Courtesy: Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel and Moma
A polymorphic scientist, Étienne-Jules Marey (5 March 1830 – 15 May 1904) explored numerous techniques and disciplines, obsessed by one unique concept: movement. First interested in flight, he studied birds and imagined mechanical devices capable of flying. From 1878, he focused on movement within human beings and, inspired by Edward Muybridge he had met in 1881, used photography to document his research.

He thus imagined, in 1882, a camera entitled photographic gun that enabled him to capture a moving subject in twelve poses. Étienne Jules Marey thus decomposed the gestures of men practicing sports, animals in motion, everyday tasks precisely observed and even the migration of air. He also invented the chronophotography that would be the precursor of cinema. Photography in its early days was the ultimate accomplice of reality but with Étienne Jules Marey (and Edward Muybridge), photography suddenly also captured the invisible.

Source: Vintage Everyday




Ottomar Anschütz, Etude du vol de la cigogne, 1884.
Anschütz started making chronophotographs of horses with 12 cameras in 1885, sponsored by the Prussian minister of Culture. He continued the motion studies of horses with 24 cameras under assignment of the Ministry of War at Königlichen Militärreitinstitut (Royal Military Institute) in Hannover during 1886, resulting in over one hundred series of sequential photographs.

Source: Wikipedia


My aim was a static representation of movement, a static composition of indications of various positions taken by a form in movement—with no attempt to give cinema effects through painting. The reduction of a head in movement to a bare line seemed to me defensible.

- Marcel Duchamp


Beyond science, chronophotography profoundly influenced the development of cinema, serving as a precursor to motion pictures through its sequential imaging, and inspired early 20th-century artists, including Futurists and Cubists like Marcel Duchamp in his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). It also laid foundational techniques for modern motion capture, as evidenced by the use of marked suits in films like *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* (2011).




Etienne-Jules Marey, Man Walking, 1890–91

Eadweard Muybridge, Animated sequence of a woman walking downstairs, frames taken by Eadweard Muybridge. Late 19th Century.


Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912



Ernst Kohlrausch, Here are 6 seconds of the ‘Chronophotography’ of Kohlrausch from 1890 of athletes doing jumps, flips and working on the parallel bars, 1890
In the 1890s, this mostly forgotten pioneer of the late pre cinema period made contributions to the development of Chronophotography. His 1st love being athletics blended in nicely with interest in body movements. Ernst Kohlrausch was interested in merging his sequence-images of athletes into a representation of natural motion through projection, however his work is barely cited in contemporary professional photographic publications.

Kohlrausch drifted towards Chronophotography in the late 1880s as a result of his scientific studies into the mechanics of human movements, and the tool that became available to him--Cinematography.

Source: RealPreCinema




Kinokam disc. Both illustrations from the Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal, February 1906 (Stephen Herbert Collection).

Source: Source: theoptilogue

Black dancers, 3.25-inch plate, variant of the subject of large disc L 04. This image has been digitally inverted (converted from negative to positive).

Source: theoptilogue


Eadweard J. Muybridge’s The Attitudes of Animals in Motion is a great example of how photography changed our understanding of the world, with the ability to capture what the naked eye cannot see.



Watch the profound impact of photography on scientific research in this film compiled in 1960, from Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering locomotion studies to Etienne-Jules Marey's revolutionary chronophotography. 



Fencing Hallucination captures the audience's pose data as an input to the Multilayer Perceptron(MLP), which generates the virtual AI Fencer's pose data. It also uses the audience's pose to synthesize the chronophotograph. The system first represents pose data as stick figures. Then it uses a diffusion model to perform image-to-image translations, converting the stick figures into a series of realistic fencing images. Finally, it combines all images with an additive effect into one image as the result. This multi-step process overcomes the challenge of preserving both the overall motion patterns and fine details when synthesizing a chronophotograph.


Darkroom | Publishing | Workshop | Dialogue