Plate Number 272. Stumbling and falling on the ground 1887

Curator: This is "Plate Number 272. Stumbling and falling on the ground," a gelatin silver print made by Eadweard Muybridge in 1887. What do you make of this sequence? Editor: It looks like a proto-animation, a flipbook splayed out. The grid and the repeating figure gives me a slightly unsettling, scientific feeling, like an experiment captured in celluloid. Curator: The motion captured here transcends simple record-keeping; Muybridge offers us archetypes, fragments of the human drama eternally played out in space and time. Stumbling, rising – familiar actions made mythic. Editor: And painstakingly made, if you think of it! Think of the time invested in setting up the sequence of cameras and triggering them just right. And then the labor to develop the glass plate negatives. It underscores how photography then wasn’t about the snapshot. It was hard work. Curator: Each pose resonates beyond the merely physical. Doesn’t it speak of vulnerability? Perhaps of humanity’s ongoing quest for balance and grace, a constant negotiation between action and reaction, fall and recovery. Editor: Indeed, but the repeated studio setting – the same mat and slatted background – forces the viewer to reckon with the context, the means of the image. This wasn’t an innocent capture, but a controlled production with a social impact. Curator: The fact that the model is nude amplifies the primal essence of movement, stripping away layers of social and cultural pretense. Editor: Exactly! Stripping away those things, but simultaneously forcing an awareness of the very industry that produces, frames, and ultimately, consumes that representation of the nude body. Curator: Viewing these captured frames lets us consider our relationship with time. I feel the continuum of experience, of action. Editor: Well said. Seeing it, I understand a bit more about how that technology both revealed new things, and at the same time shaped new modes of seeing, consumption, and understanding what it is to be human.