Certainly the work reflects a common nineteenth century world-view concerning appropriate activities for men and women. Muybridge's men run and jump, but they also drill as soldiers, box, sword fight, plane wood, saw and hammer. His women are a bit more demure - they care for children and carry endless bowls of water. Muybridge also infused these routine images with an undeniable erotic nature. On both sides of the gender line Muybridge arranges naked bodies in close proximity.
Several plates focus on teenage boys wrestling, arms and legs encircling each other.
His images of women reveal a vocabulary of positions and situations which would reoccur in modern pornography - a women kneels in a position of supplication as another offers her a drink from a large jar. The Gilbreths' photographs revealmore than just an exhaustive search for efficiency. In the sad, quizzical but ultimately unreadable faces of their subjects, the Gilbreths captured not the human body at work but rather the face, wary but held immobile by economic forces beyond their grasp. In Muybridge's endless parade of humanity, we see the photographer at work long past any pretense at science, using the vast apparatus of the academy to create the nascent outlines of a narrative cinema. And reflected in his images, captured by them as surely as the movements of his subjects, is a caveat to his viewers - to not believe everything they see.