Models for Animal Locomotion
The University of Pennsylvania provided a number of students and other men, women, and children as models for Muybridge’s project. Many of the athletes, tradesmen, and teachers who were chosen to participate in this study of “the movements of everyday life” had a “well-earned record in the particular feat selected for illustration.” Muybridge also photographed hospital patients to illustrate their abnormal movements, and animals and birds from the Philadelphia Zoo.

Muybridge asked his human models to pose dressed and undressed, and to perform activities seemingly unrelated to the concerns of science. What physiological laws, for example, can be derived from a woman throwing herself on a heap of hay?