Animal Locomotion, Plate 467

Eadweard Muybridge was one of the world?s most influential and innovative photographers. He was well known for producing sequential images of moving animals and humans as artistic and scientific experimentations that changed the way we understand motion and for revealing photographic capabilities critical to the development of early photography and cinema. These photographs were often presented with Muybridge?s invented zoopraxiscope, a mechanism that projected the stills as a moving image. One of many in Muybridge?s famous Animal Locomotion series, Animal Locomotion, Plate 467 is a black-and-white sequence of a total of 24 images depicting a toddler walking, shot both in profile and from behind. Like the adult male figure, the horse, the deer and the dog captured by Muybridge, these images demonstrate the specificity of physical bodily movement in the simple motion of a small child.