Plate Number 132. Descending stairs, turning to look around and waving hand 1887

This is Eadweard Muybridge’s "Plate Number 132. Descending stairs, turning to look around and waving hand". Muybridge made a name for himself using photography to study human and animal locomotion. His work emerged during a time when scientific and artistic interests often overlapped. This photographic study captures a woman, nude, descending a staircase, turning, waving. The sequence might appear as a straightforward scientific record at first glance. Yet, consider the act of photographing a nude woman during the Victorian era, and what this implies about power, gender, and visibility. How does the act of dissecting movement into discrete frames change our perception of the body? Does it reveal truth, or does it strip away a certain humanity? This work invites us to reflect on the cultural norms around the body, and the gaze of both science and art. It challenges us to consider what is gained, and what is lost, when motion is frozen in time.