[Bird in Flight] 1886

Etienne-Jules Marey made this fascinating chronophotograph, "Bird in Flight," sometime around 1886 using a process of his own invention. What strikes one immediately is the decomposition of movement into a series of discrete images. Each phase of the bird's flight is captured and laid out in sequence across the frame. This disrupts our conventional understanding of time and motion, presenting them instead as a collection of static moments. Marey plays with the idea of continuous versus fragmented experience, highlighting the illusion of fluidity that our eyes perceive in real-time motion. In breaking down a natural event into analyzable segments, Marey bridges art and science, anticipating the investigations into time and space that would preoccupy early modernists and the Cubists, as well as inform the development of film as an art form. The image makes us question our understanding of time and challenges our assumptions about how we perceive the world.