William Chapman Sharpe's "The Art of Walking"

William Chapman Sharpe is professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Art of Walking: A History in 100 Images, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Art of Walking does not fail its test! The image on that page is a stereoscopic view of New York in 1859, Broadway on a Rainy Day, photographed by Edward Anthony. The image appears halfway through my book’s tour of walking’s visual history, and it could hardly involve a more decisive moment. For the first time ever, technology made it possible to stop a step in mid-air and freeze it forever on a photographic plate.

What artists, scientists, and the general public discovered was how peculiar walking really is. It’s a “perpetual falling with a perpetual self-recovery,” wrote Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Physiology of Walking,” an essay published in the same year. Holmes himself had invented a stereopticon, which gives photos a three-dimensional quality, and he studied thousands of stereoscopic pictures, especially Anthony’s, to figure out what goes on in a single stride. Deciding that walking was actually “balanced vertical progression,” he declared that “no artist would have dared to draw a walking figure in attitudes like some of these.”

What he and Anthony’s audience found was that walkers raise the heel of the trailing leg almost vertically as they push off from it. They bend their knees significantly as the unweighted leg pendulums forward, while the head dips at the same time. Then as the heel strikes the leg straightens and the body surges not just forward, but upward, too. Holmes hired a professional illustrator, F. O.C. Darley to do line drawings of the photo-captured walks, so that artists and anatomists could study them.

This photo-frozen walk is just one of the 100 images that my book analyzes as it attempts to tell the story of human locomotion, from cave art to moon walks, from peripatetic Plato to the locked-down victims of the COVID pandemic. On the deepest level, what page 99 really shows is the inception of gait recognition systems and total pedestrian surveillance. With the stop-motion photo, the age of the Watched Walker had begun.

Learn more about The Art of Walking at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: New York Nocturne.

The Page 99 Test: Grasping Shadows.

--Marshal Zeringue