This series of images of an obese woman walking is one of the
781 collotypes which form Eadweard Muybridge's 1887 magnum opus,
'Animal Locomotion'.
Muybridge’s work on capturing the motion of animals began with a
dispute in 1871 between his employer, railroad magnate Leland
Stanford, and Robert Bonner about whether a trotting horse ever had
all four feet off the ground at once. Muybridge photographed each
stage in the trot of Stanford’s horse Occident, and determined that
at some points all four of the animal’s feet were clear of the
ground.
Muybridge further developed his photographic techniques at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1884-1885. 'Animal Locomotion'
contains 95 plates devoted to the horse and 124 to other animals.
The other 562 are devoted to men, women, and children, nude,
semi-nude, and draped, walking, running, dancing, getting up and
lying down, wrestling, boxing, leaping, and other illustrations of
the human body in motion.