Movements of air : the photographs from Etienne-Jules Marey’s wind tunnels

The book "Movements of Air" reprints the breathtaking pictures of Étienne-Jules Marey, that he took between 1899 and 1901 during his scientific experiments with moving air and smoke, and complements them with two essays of Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni.

Laurent Mannoni accurately reflects Marey's experimental approach. As the founder of the "graphic method," Marey is also the developer of an aerodynamic wind tunnel. His experiments' photographs in fluid motion introduce us to a whole world of movements, turbulences and fluids. The resulting images influenced generations of scientists and artists alike.

Georges Didi-Huberman expands on the philosophical debates surrounding these aesthetically and technically instructive images. He makes Bergson the main interlocutor and even the secret commentator of the scientist's experiments. Even though the scientist's main interest was graphic information, Huberman shows us how the flow of all things draws the ingenious experimenter to a photographic practice that creates drags, streaks, expansions, and visual dances.

Marey's wind tunnel photographs were therefore themselves causes of turbulence in the history of images. The two artists Florian Dombois and Christoph Oeschger explore the "graphical" vortices of the last 120 years and provide at the end of the book a collage from historical and contemporary material interlaced with their own image making in Dombois's wind tunnel at the Zurich University of the Arts.

The book was published originally in French on the occasion of the exhibition "Mouvements de l'air" at the Musee d'Orsay. The texts are now available for the first time as an English translation.