Walking

A study of the boxer Ben Bailey, the "mulatto pugilist," in motion on 2 June 1885. The backdrop features the first appearance of the metrological grid system used to accurately portray body proportions in Eadweard Muybridge's vast study of animal locomotion. Muybridge likely adopted this grid system from J. H. Lamprey, who utilized it in ethnographic photographs of Malayan subjects. The grid system, its historical anthropometric use, the mixed-race subject, and their contemporarily strange physique suggest a commentary on race and masculinity discernible to a white Reconstruction-era audience.