Man Walking Around the Corner

Over time, Louis Le Prince’s Man Walking Around the Corner (1887) remains a simple yet ambitious experiment. A labourer, in soiled clothes, leaves his work, staring intensely at Le Prince’s sixteen-lens camera. The new device, unlike any of its predecessors, was an all-encompassing apparatus allowing the capture of multiple photographs from closely aligned viewpoints, and, allegedly, capable of projecting them in motion. This series of photographs was captured in Paris before finding its way to Britain in a letter to the director’s wife in the summer of 1887. Individually, each image has little significance; collectively, they mark an early attempt to record motion, heralding the emergence of a new medium.