Marion Faller, a photographer with great wit interested in the everyday quirks of human nature, and her husband, Hollis Frampton, an experimental filmmaker who focused on the serial nature of his medium, often worked together. One of their best-known collaborations, Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion, married their respective interests, looking to the history of photography in a conceptual satire of the sequence.

As Faller and Frampton explained, “[Eadweard] Muybridge, having once consciously fastened upon time as his grand subject, quickly emptied his images as nearly as he could of everything else. His animals, athletes, and subverted painter’s models are nameless and mostly naked, performing their banalities, purged of drama, if not of occasional horseplay, before a uniform grid of Cartesian coordinates, a kind of universal ‘frame of reference.’ ” Following his lead, they humorously animated inert vegetables to enact various pointless activities on a backdrop that implies scientific legitimacy.