This is the first of two photos in today's series by John Lamprey and it depicts a handsome Chinese man from about 1869. The pattern in the background is a uniform grid developed by a British scientist named Huxley, and it appears in a significant proportion of the anthropometric photos in my collection. The idea was that by standardizing the grid, it could be size matched to make accurate comparisons of subjects photographed at different times and places. Clever, that.
That was the kind of grid in front of which I was videoed running on a treadmill at the sports clinic I attended. I found out only recently that Sir Adolphe Abrahams (1883 – 1967), the elder brother of Harold Abrahams - the famous Olympian who was the subject of that wonderful film Chariots of Fire - was in fact the founder of sports medicine and only today do I learn the origin of that grid, used a century later.
ReplyDeleteHappy to have, for once, enlightened you rather than the other way round.
DeleteHe has an amazingly long pigtail. A lifetime of growth perhaps…
ReplyDeleteIt would seem so, and I'm guessing there's some cultural significance there.
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