A contemporary of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey was not a photographer. His field was physiology, a relatively new science of the human body that allowed him to indulge his love of physics and engineering. Marey considered the body an animate machine, subject to the same laws as inanimate machines, and he dedicated his life to analyzing the laws that governed its movements
Etienne Jules Marey hat Bilder hinterlassen, eine Fülle von Bildern; einige sind uns kostbar, gehören sie doch zu den ersten Kinobildern überhaupt... Diesen Aufnahmen verdankt Marey seinen Platz in der Geschichte. Menschen und Tiere, die sich vor dem Objektiv eines Wissenschaftlers entwickeln, der meinte: "Wir müssen uns auf die Suche nach den Gesetzen des Lebens machen." Hinter diesen Bildern steht der Scharfblick eines Mannes, der sich folgendermaßen beschrieb: "Ich habe keine Erinnerung, ich besitze nur das Gedächtnis des Auges." Und hinter diesem Blick ein anderer, der eines träumerischen Kindes, unabhängig, sich für Mechanik begeisternd, ein junger Mediziner und Physiologe
Étienne-Jules Marey (b. 5 March 1830; d. 15 May 1904) started his career as an assistant surgeon in 1855, and specialised in human and animal physiology. In 1867 he became Professor of Natural History. He was the inventor of the "chronophotograph" (1888) from which modern cinematography was developed. Some in fact see Marey, rather than the Lumière brothers, as the true father of cine photography, though Marey's equipment had no transparent film, no perforation of film stock, and no claw to move the film along. Whereas Muybridge had used a number of cameras to study movement, Marey used only one, and the movements being recorded on one photographic plate. Characteristic of his pictures were his studies of the human in motion, where the subjects wore black suits with metal strips or white lines, as they passed in front of the black backdrops.