What is chronophotography?

Google today dedicates its Doodle to the English photographer Edward James Muggeridge (1830-1904), better known by the pseudonym Eadweard Muybridge, who devoted much of his life to recording the movement. Specifically, his relationship with chronophotography – capturing a sequence of still images that capture a scene or a movement – began when he tried to prove that, at a moment of the horse's trot, all four legs of the animal were in the air at the same time . In 1877, he finally managed to obtain a set of plates made at a shutter speed of around one thousandth of a second, resorting to clockwork systems and mechanisms that blocked several cameras as the horses passed by, when they touched very fine stretched wires. from one side of the track to the other. And so he showed that in fact, in a moment of trotting the horses did not touch the ground with their hooves.

In 1887 he compiled his work and published it under the title Animal Locomotion , a work that was widely disseminated among scientists and artists. From then on, he also dedicated himself to portraying hundreds of human models, naked or dressed, immersed in activities such as running, walking, boxing, practicing fencing or descending stairs. In 1901 a work entitled The Human Figure in Motion , an immense atlas of locomotion, was published in London. Altogether Muybridge produced 781 plates in his lifetime and more than 20,000 images documenting almost all phases of movement. Due to his sequential study of human and animal movement, he is considered the inventor of chronophotography, the direct antecedent of animated photography and cinema.