Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was an English-born photographer who settled in the United States in 1851, where he undertook various occupations before dedicating himself to photography. In his early years as a photographer, he created stereoscopic views, urban views of San Francisco and its surroundings, and also participated in exploration missions promoted by the government, such as those conducted in Yosemite Valley and Alaska. During these expeditions, he captured photographs of natural landscapes within an aesthetic of the sublime. During the 1860s, he also traveled through Central America, capturing images with similar themes.

A key aspect of his photographic work was his research on the movement of both animal and human bodies, in which, for the first time in history, motion was graphically documented. Using multiple synchronized cameras that captured sequential images, Muybridge visually represented different phases of movement—phases that the human eye cannot distinguish individually. These images were published in the work Animal locomotion (1887), a collection of 11 volumes, followed by other works such as The attitudes of animals in motion (1881), The human figure in motion (1901), and Animals in motion (1902). In relation to his photographs depicting body movement, in 1879, he invented the Zoopraxiscope, a device that combined the functions of the magic lantern and optical image-enlargement instruments, enabling the sequential projection of photographs to create a perception of continuous movement, essentially an early form of motion pictures and a precursor to the cinematograph.

Muybridge’s photographs captured the construction of the human and animal body and its movement almost 40 years before artists like Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) revolutionized painting with their interpretations of reality through overlapping planes. This can be seen in works such as Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by the former and Nude descending a staircase, no. 2 (1912) by the latter, which specifically depicts the sequential movement of the human body.