Plate Number 19. Walking, commencing to turn around 1887

Eadweard Muybridge made this photographic print of a female figure in motion, using a complex multi-camera setup. This was part of a larger project in the 1880s to document human and animal locomotion, a study of movement. Muybridge was working in an era of rapid technological and social change. The late 19th century saw the rise of scientific positivism and the belief that objective observation could unlock the secrets of the natural world. His work was informed by this drive to record and analyze movement, using the relatively new medium of photography. But what was the social context? Here, the female nude was a traditional subject in art history, but Muybridge approached it with a scientific, rather than an aesthetic, gaze. The result is a depiction of the human body, devoid of idealization, but rather as an object of study. To fully understand Muybridge, scholars consult sources like his published volumes, and also delve into the history of science, photography, and social attitudes toward the body in the Victorian era. The history of art is always contingent on the context in which it was made.