When these contact sheets were made in around 1982 the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge were of interest for being almost a hundred years old. His was a very scientific approach to the study of locomotion in animals but while I found his images exciting for their energy and their measured performance, his concerns were not my own. I was interested much more in the image itself - how each exposure interacted with the one before to create a narrative which might be very unscientific.

There was measurement and calculation involved of course, exposure times had to be controlled so as not to burn the details out and the sequences were very much staged but the action involved served no particular purpose. Just a shot in the dark. As frames were added to the image they redrew the figure, with some elements combining and others falling away. As the layers built up new forms emerged which seem now to be the constants or the enduring deposit of the event being photographed. On one level they are abstract physical forms, on another level they suggest narratives or a presence which carries a more emotive weight. I have only three contact sheets and a handful of enlargements from this body of work and none of the negatives

These are lost moments. The people have left and live other lives, the room itself may no longer exist. The moment remains only as a chemical change on light-sensitive paper and in my memory which I cannot be sure is entirely accurate. Now, more than forty years later, these images rest at the threshold of a past which cannot be accessed and a future which has yet to happen - exactly like the figures themselves in the moment they were photographed.

The room was dark, an attic, the curtains were drawn to keep out the bright sunlight of early summer. What we talked about, what each of us thought I don’t know. I must have thought about the task in hand, the future of these images, my grand and successful future, but the sitters? What does one think about in that awkward, absent space of still performance, being watched by another person with a critical eye? The day. The night to come; the sounds in the street; love and history and the barking dog. We are all these things every moment of our lives.

Now cannot be separated from the moment before or the moment after.
The present moment is haunted by the presence of all our other moments.

The model was a friend of mine, Eric Rainey, someone with whom I lost contact many years ago