Etienne-Jules Marey was a physiologist and chronophotographer. Born in Beaune, France, in 1830, Marey went to Paris in 1849 to enrol at the faculty of medicine and to study surgery and physiology. He qualified as a doctor in 1859, and in 1864 set up in a small Parisian laboratory where he studied the circulation of the blood, publishing Le mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie in 1868. From 1863, Marey perfected the first elements of his 'methode graphique', which studied movement using recorded instruments and graphs. Using polygraphs and similar recording instruments he succeded in analysing diagrammatically the walk of man and of a horse, the flight of birds and insects. The results - published in La Machine Animale in 1873 - aroused much interest and led Leland Stanford and Eadweard Muybridge to pursue their own researches, by means of photography, into horse movement. In turn, the influence of Muybridge and of those in Marey's circle, including Alphonse Penaud, (...)