Using a process that made multiple exposures on a single
photographic plate in rapid succession, Étienne-Jules Marey could capture the visible traces of an entire movement in
regular intervals and study that action at a level of detail not attainable by
earlier photographic technologies. Although his studies were meant to help
understand how specific actions might be carried out more efficiently and
effectively, Marey’s photographs also foreshadow the revolutionary appearance
of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a
Staircase (1912) or the work of the Italian Futurist painters, extending
the two dimensions of a picture into the fourth dimension of time.