Plate Number 521. A: Walking. B: Ascending step. C. Throwing disk. D: Using shovel. E, F. Using pick 1887

Eadweard Muybridge made this photographic plate, sometime in the late 19th century, using a wet collodion process. This involved coating a glass plate with chemicals, exposing it in a camera while still wet, and then developing it immediately. Note the range of activities Muybridge documented; from walking and ascending a step, to throwing a disk, using a shovel, and wielding a pick. Each of these actions is captured as a sequence of individual images, a grid of frozen moments in time. Muybridge's meticulous, almost scientific approach strips away the illusion of continuous motion. He reveals labor itself to be a sum of discrete operations. In that way, these photographs inadvertently show that work is work: discontinuous, atomized, a stark contrast to the romanticized vision of labor that was prevalent at the time. The photographic process— itself laborious and technologically driven—mirrors the industrializing world Muybridge inhabited. He gives us a new way of understanding the human body in motion, and by extension, the nature of work itself.