The Body in Motion

In the next section, “The Body in Motion,” we look carefully at the impact of motion photography, or chronophotography, on art theory and practice in the late nineteenth century. The larger context for the pioneers in this new field, like Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, was the international physical educational movement and the scientific study of physiology. These ideals of the body in motion were crucial to the generation of artists studying in the 1880s and 1890s as well as to such influential figures in American culture as Theodore Roosevelt, who championed the benefits of a fit body.