Page 73 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 73/146
No doubt with the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey freshly in his mind, the 24-year-old Marcel Duchamp sets out to paint a picture that combines the Cubist innova- tion of Braque and Picasso with the Futurist aspirations announced by Marinetti in 1909 - adding dynamism and movement to what he considered as ‘static’ Cubism. This painting must have ap- pealed to Duchamp as a conceptual project, rather than necessarily a ‘painting’ - his first attempt in 1911 (Nude Descending A Staircase No1) leaves a lot to be desired aesthetically, but begins to ad- dress his aim of materialising the idea of Cubism + Kinetics. When Nude Descending No2 was ex- hibited in New York’s Armory Show in 1912 it really announced the beginnings of the new ‘modern- ism’ in painting - a radical movement away from photo-realism, from conventional pictorialism, to- wards the abstract or abstracted work that was to epitomise painting in the early 20th century. In 1961, in an interview with the BBC Monitor programme, Duchamp recalls 1912: "In 1912 ... the idea of describing the movement of a nude coming downstairs while still retaining static visual means to do this, particularly interested me. The fact that I had seen chronophotographs of fencers in ac- tion and horse galloping (what we today call stroboscopic photography) gave me the idea for the Nude. It doesn't mean that I copied these photographs. The Futurists were also interested in somewhat the same idea, though I was never a Futurist. And of course the motion picture with its cinematic techniques was developing then too. The whole idea of movement, of speed, was in the air.”
Jacques Henri Lartigue: Grand Prix ACF 1913
Of course others were experimenting in capturing speed in a still photograph. Lartigue had snapped his sister jumping down the garden steps (Bichonnade Leaping c1912) - this (above) is Lartigue’s shot of a racing car - either snapped and the speed slant ‘discovered’ accidentally, or taken with a very carefully timed shutter-speed to progressively capture the car’s movement across the frame as the shutter opened from top to bottom, giving this dynamic slant to the image. (read: Jaques Henri Lartigue: Diary of A Century 1970 - a photographic record of his childhood, his youth, his lovers and wives, his children, the wealthy and his often very talented circle and wealthy circle of friends - a fascinating and moving book. )
Thirty years later, imaging scientists like Harold Edgerton had discovered the potential of strobo- scopic photography - holding a camera shutter open while a fast flashing strobe light illuminated the moving subject - this resulted in a high-precision version of the kind of chrono-photography that Étienne-Jules Marey had invented in the 1880s. The Albanian-American photographer, Gjon Mili - one of Edgerton’s students, made the strobe photograph an art-form in the 1940s with his ad- venturous stop-motion compound images (see next page)