Movements of air

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The book reprints breathtaking images by Étienne-Jules Marey, taken between 1899 and 1901 during his experiments with moving air and smoke, and features essays by Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni. Mannoni reflects on Marey's experimental approach, highlighting his role as the founder of the "graphic method" and developer of an aerodynamic wind tunnel. The photographs of fluid motion reveal a world of movements, turbulences, and fluids that have influenced generations of scientists and artists. Didi-Huberman delves into the philosophical debates surrounding these images, positioning Bergson as a key interlocutor and commentator on Marey's work. While Marey focused on graphic information, Huberman illustrates how the flow of all things led the experimenter to a photographic practice that captures drags, streaks, expansions, and visual dances. Marey's wind tunnel photographs have thus caused turbulence in the history of images. Artists Florian Dombois and Christoph Oeschger explore the "graphical" vortices of the past 120 years, concluding the book with a collage of historical and contemporary material intertwined with their own image-making in Dombois's wind tunnel at the Zurich University of the Arts. Originally published in French for the exhibition "Mouvements de l'air" at the Musée d'Orsay, the texts are now available in English for the first time.