Both Balla and Duchamp were inspired by the experimental photography works of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne Jules Marey and Thomas Eakins. These pioneers of photography offered a model to such artists, who examined movement by analyzing it through a series of moments in time. Muybridge’s pioneering work in photographic studies of motion was influential to artists, especially for his analysis on the galloping horse. In 1872, Muybridge was requested to settle a bet concerning the positioning of a horse’s legs when galloping and trotting. He discovered the movement of a horse has been misrepresented for centuries, after documenting its motion using his newly invented mechanically tripped shutters. His advancements in film were able to showcase a…show more content… He assisted with Muybridge’s work at the University of Pennsylvania, later carrying out his own trials in documenting phases of motion superimposed on one negative, a method used in Marey’s work known as chronophotography. French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey adopted this approach of recording movement, transforming our way of seeing time and motion. He experimented with the idea of creating multiple exposures on one photographic surface, using both film strips and glass plates. Marey became fascinated with the flight of birds but had no success in photographing birds in flight, similar to the galloping horse in Muybridge’s experiments. As a result, Marey invented a “photographic gun” to register the stages of a bird’s flight using a “clock-mechanism that made 12 exposures at 1/72nd of a second” (Pipes, 2003) (Fig. 13). In addition, he conducted many investigations of humans in motion wearing black attire with white bands along the length of the limbs. The individuals moved in front of black panels, documenting their motions using only one camera and recorded on a single glass plate. His photographs and diagrams inspired artists throughout the age of Futurism and continued to reverberate throughout the first decades of twentieth-century visual
