Passage of Venus

Jules Janssen allowed the world to gaze at stellar objects for the first time on film in "Passage of Venus" (1874). He gave hope that one day images in motion could become part of our quest to understand the world we inhabit. This series of photographs explored the use of moving images for scientific purposes, thus paving the way for an effective collaboration between art and science. It also set off the race for the discovery of cinema, outlining the basic technical requirement of a succession of rapidly changing static photographs—a concept that has fundamentally remained unchanged over the last one hundred and fifty years.