Woman Walking Downstairs

Eadweard Muybridge’s fascination with the nude resembles the concern classical artists had with the body. His Woman Walking Downstairs (1887) takes the simplicity of the act to celebrate human beauty within a new art-form. Conversely, a quarter of a century later, Marcel Duchamp pushed the boundaries of modernist painting, paying tribute to Muybridge’s work. This study of locomotion acts as a decoy for an artistic endeavour to paint through moving photography. Muybridge’s approach is never explicitly erotic; rather, sensuality exudes from the method of representation, capturing the elegance of the subject with raw animalistic desire. Starting with a wave, the lady at the centre of this chronophotographic sequence leaves a lasting legacy celebrating the female body through moving images.