BOOK REVIEW : Obsessed by a Vision of Time in Motion : PICTURING TIME, The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey by Martha Braun University of Chicago Press: $35; 450 pages

Although a physiologist by profession, Etienne-Jules Marey was by avocation a bricoleur, or tinkerer. The last century was the heyday of such men--Edison and Bell in the United States and the movie-inventing Lumieres brothers in France, all patenting what they hoped would be commercial bonanzas.

Marey was different. A scientist, he scorned self-promotion and the marketplace and saw patents solely as an avenue to finance research. Among his successes were a sphygmograph (this proto-EKG made an image of the pulse), a wind tunnel and the precursor to the motion picture camera.

His approach, new in his day, was the methodical acquisition and quantification of data. This skill attracted the attention of epidemiologists in 1883, when cholera struck his home city of Beaune. Familiar both with the town’s geography and with meticulously scientific procedures, he managed to track down and verify the source of pollution.

At first glance, Marta Braun writes in “Picturing Time,” Marey might seem to fit Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor of the fox, scurrying from project to project.

In fact, Braun’s elegant and lucid narrative reveals Marey to be closer to Berlin’s metaphor of the hedgehog, in that he spent his life obsessed with a single enterprise. Marey’s inventions may have seemed wildly varied, but all stemmed from a single quest: the desire to visualize motion.

Like his contemporaries who worked with microscopes, Marey sought to picture what is invisible to the naked eye. To Marey, motion was the core of life, and he was determined to see how living bodies move when speed obscures the mechanics.

So he invented a series of cameras, one of which he dubbed a “photogun” (shaped like a rifle, it shot a rapid series of pictures). These multiple photographs captured the movement of a bird’s wings in flight, a horse’s legs running and a fencer thrusting his sword.

Marey’s studies resemble the works of the photographer Eadyeard Muybridge, a colleague who shared his interest if not his technical skill. Braun’s excellently argued analysis of the two photographers reverses the historical record. Marey has been known for his effect on artists like Duchamps and Picasso, while Muybridge won scientific acclaim for his motion studies.

In fact, Braun writes, Marey saw himself as a scientist, while Muybridge’s motion studies, doctored to look real, were only superficially scientific.

Braun, a film professor at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto, introduces her subject by describing her search for the historical Marey--an adventure in its own right, for Marey left instructions that all personal papers be destroyed after his death.

Much of what we knew about him, consequently, came from his scientific papers. His remarkable photographic plates and films, lost for half a century, have come to light again only recently.

A seemingly bland personality compared to Muybridge (who made headlines when he murdered his wife’s lover), Marey was an only child and a lifelong bachelor. Yet his installation of his daughter as his “niece” in his Parisian home and the presence of the child’s mother, who was married to the director of the Paris Globe, as his hostess in Paris and Naples reflect not only a rich private life, but a peculiarly permissive society.

Braun portrays Marey’s Paris and the rich texture of its artistic, scientific and philosophical world with clarity and wit. She explains how his photography, crucial to the time and motion studies of Frederick Taylor and Frank Gilbreth, has since been supplanted by X-rays, faster film and computer enhancement. Yet Marey’s place in the history of art is secure.

Duchamp’s “Nude Descending the Staircase” (1913), for instance, was obviously influenced by Marey’s photographs; it exemplified an artistic convention of representing motion by a series of overlapping images.

Braun analyzes a complicated legacy. Marey’s time and motion studies contributed to the cause of women’s economic equality by proving that women exert as much energy in their factory jobs as men and therefore deserve equal pay. They also helped make tools like bicycles and typewriters more “user friendly.”

But Marey’s vision of the body-as-machine also had deleterious effects, as exemplified by the Nazis’ exploitation of slave labor and the Nazi doctors’ “research” on the bodies of those they murdered.

“Picturing Time” is a feast for the eye as well as for the mind. Beautifully designed and illustrated, Braun’s book serves up a rare combination of anecdote and profound insight.