As I was walking through the Willowbrook Mall before Christmas, one of the stores that was going out of business – I think it might have been Lord & Taylor – had a large display of mannequins for sale, as part of a liquidation sale. When I saw this series of mannequins, which look like a man preparing to kick a soccer ball, the way they were positioned all in a row made me think of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and his photographic studies of people in motion. Scroll down below my photo for more on Muybridge and an example of his work.
Here’s an example of a motion study by Eadweard Muybridge, from the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Titled “Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements,” it dates from the 1880s and shows a man in the process of jumping. For more on Eadweard Muybridge, please click here.
