Eadweard Muybridge made pioneering photographic studies of motion in the 1880s. Using a technically innovative camera set-up, Muybridge captured humans and animals in various stages of activity. Muybridge published the project in 1887 as Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movement, which included 781 plates, comprising 20,000 individual photographs. Whereas many pictures in the portfolio portrayed full-body movements through space, this one isolates the movement of a single human hand against a dark backdrop.