Gallery 13, 10th August 2002, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK, 2003
Time|Motion - Photographs by Jonathan Shaw, Harold Edgerton & Eadweard Muybridge
This exhibition
‘Time|Motion’,
held at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery from July to
September 2003, brought together the work of three
photographers, Eadweard
Muybridge, Harold
Edgerton and Jonathan
Shaw.
All three have links with Birmingham: Muybridge being a
visitor and lecturer in the city in 1890; Edgerton having
the first exhibition of his astonishing high-speed
photographs made in the 1930s and 40s shown there in the
1970s; and Shaw being a Birmingham-based photographer whose
subject matter includes the city and its people.
Central to the project was Jonathan Shaw’s commission
to produce two site-specific new pieces for the exhibition.
Shaw observed and documented the movement of visitors
within a range of gallery spaces at Birmingham Museum &
Art Gallery to produce the new works, a computer
interactive and a spectacular large print, over thirteen
metres long, which ran the length of the gallery in which
it was shot – the largest single photograph ever
displayed in the Museum.
Shaw’s work was shown alongside plates from
Muybridge’s revolutionary 11 volume Animal Locomotion
(1887), part of Birmingham Central Library’s
important photography collections, and key examples of
Edgerton's highspeed photographs generously lent by
Geoffrey W. Holt. Together the work of these three
photographers demonstrates the extraordinary potential of
the photographic image to explore and capture movement and
the passage of time.