Athlete Walking 2

Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of human locomotion filmed at Palo Alto Stock Farm include the most fundamental actions. In Athlete Walking 2 (1881), the subject performs the most basic of human activities, allowing us to observe the all-too-familiar movements of musculature captured with notable success in Classical Greco-Roman and Renaissance art. This unremarkable activity found form in a sequence of photographs within the emerging medium of moving pictures. Though rudimentary in concept, these images provided certainty about which muscles are engaged in the practice of walking, marking one of the earliest confirmations of what artists had long believed. Through photography, Muybridge demonstrated the critical role film was to play as scientific evidence in the years to come.