As I was explaining in the last post of the series , the collaboration between the photographer Albert Londe and the physiologists and clinicians at La Salpêtrière led to a new conception of emotional expressions. The need to capture the signs of hysteria shifted the focus from the face to the body: facial expressions were meaningful as much as they were accompanied by bodily gestures. But this apparently minor shift also had repercussions on the use of photography. While instantaneous photography seemed the perfect technology to freeze the otherwise fleeting expressions, it had limitations to capture gestures. How could one single image summarize the whole choreography of gestures that patients did under hypnosis?
Londe took very seriously this question. The issue for him was not to reduce exposure times so to capture the ‘instant’ – the key of Darwin’s photographic project- but how to record movement. During the first years at the Salpêrtrière, his solution was the making of photographic series, putting together several photographs that captured the different stages of an hysterical attack -photographs that actually corresponded to several attacks suffered by the same person. This system, similar to the examples examined in the previous post, gave the impressions of movement. However, as Londe explained in his treatise La photographie médicale, the photographs still captured ‘random’ moments:
“It is possible to capture the patient and to immobilize him by means of the instantaneous photography. However, these pictures taken randomly only represent one of the phases of the movement, a phase that our eye might not even perceive because of its rapidity. We will obtain a document, but we cannot accept that this document alone is able to show what we have perceived (Londe, 1893: 96-97)”
The solution of this should be “a special device that allows taking a certain number of pictures within particular intervals as close or apart from each other as we want them to be” (Londe, 1883: 127)”. I think these quotations are key to understand the scientific use of photography in this context. For Londe, it wasn’t enough to capture several instants, but the intervals between instants had to be regulated too, so the movement could be effectively analysed.
Of course, Londe was talking about chronophotography. First developed by Eadweard Muybridge in San Francisco in 1878 and then adopted and developed by others such as Étienne-Jules Marey, Jules Janssen and Georges Demenÿ, chronophotography was the taking of a succession of images in a particular period of time. Therefore, at the time that Londe was working at La Salpêtrière, this technique was already known in Parisian scientific circles. But he still invented his own chronophotographic device. There are several reasons to justify this -including Londe’s ability to invent photographic mechanisms. But, as Londe repeated time after time, each system should be adapted to the movement it had to capture, and the kind of scientific knowledge they were expecting to obtain. His analysis of the physiology of movement, both in healthy and pathological conditions, could not be done through the same means as Marey analysed the direction of movement. Basically, the chronophotography at La Salpêtrière had to fulfill two conditions: both the intervals between shots and the shutters’ speed should be manipulable, so they could be adapted to different kinds of movements (irregular but slow movements, almost imperceptible but very fast movements like tremblings, etc.) The camera that Londe invented with this aim captured 12 images in the same plate (three rows of four).
Among the movements that Londe examined with Paul Richer, there was the “expressive gait”. This was a particular kind of walk, in which the passions of the man were translated in the way in which he moved. Richer put as an example the ‘enthusiastic gait’, the one “of the warrior coming back home” or “the common man singing La Marselleise” (Richer, 1895).
“demarche enthusiaste”, Richer, Physiologie artistique de l’homme en mouvement, p. 3.
Made available under Creative Commons, Public Domain Mark by Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
The book did not reproduced the whole chronophotographic series, but only the illustration that Richer made after the most representative shot. As Richer explained, the most characteristic features of this gait were not on the face of the model, but in the way in which he stepped into the ground. It was through his legs that the passions were expressed. This whole experience challenged the very principles established by the great masters, Darwin and Duchenne. The passions -this school of thought did not use the word ’emotions’- were not mainly expressed through the combination of the facial muscles, but in the movements of the whole body -the arms, the legs, the chest. Therefore, instantaneous photography was not enough: movements had to recorded rather than ‘captured’.
These chronophotographs were taken in 1895 -at the dawn of film. Londe himself made some films, and other chronophotographers such as Demenÿ played a key role in the development of this technique. However, very few studies continued the physiological analysis of movement and the passions in this direction.
Why? We’ll see in the next post!
Photographic Histories 