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A photograph is not a lie, exactly, but there is much left out. You go to a place and focus some light onto a flat rectangle for a 30th of a second, taking a tiny slice of time, squashing four dimensions down to two, and ignoring all but one of the five senses. What’s left is not much, really. Yet we might later refer to that little rectangle to remember being somewhere, or to show someone else what it was like, even present it as evidence. The mind fills in a lot of blanks, and loves to do it. Memory itself seems like sifting through piles of snapshots, fragmentary sensations synching up with the meanings we attach to them to regenerate a version of some experience, our own or someone else’s. A drawing starts with blank paper and a pencil in a hand, but a photograph begins with an image captured from the outside world. It’s a fragment of a story. Something happened just before and just after. Something is just outside the frame. A roll of film records a sequence of light exposures. So does a digital memory card full of numbered image files. The picture sequence is a kind of primary-source historical narrative, a series of visual records, each of which provides a tiny bit of direct connection to the real place and time where it was made. Make of it what you will. ––———
This project began in the early 2000s with an antique camera designed to make eight 6 x 9 cm frames on a piece of 120 roll film. (See the Full 120 series.) The angle of view of the lens is 45 degrees (approximating the "normal" human binocular field of view). Forty-five degrees times 8 frames edge-to-edge is 360 degrees, so one roll of film works out to one complete spin. Clearly, a roll of 120 film has an inherent proportional relationship to human experience. But perfection isn't everything. The advance mechanism is completely manual—you look through a little red window on the back of the camera waiting for the next number to show up in order to align the next frame properly. Soon enough, you might advance the film small random amounts and just see what happened with the overlapping exposures knowing that, no matter what, the film would be a document (however fragmentary and inscrutable) of some movement through place and time. Version 2.0 of this project—Place/Time—is fully digital and in color instead of black-and-white, but the same idea: the overlapping sequence of images, left to right, moves through a place over time. Sometimes it moves in a circle, sometimes along a path, maybe across an ocean. Occasionally, the world moves by the camera. Though the film itself has retired, the idea was born on film and thus the shape of the image remains that of a sheet of 120 roll film, 6 x 80 centimeters, the natural proportions of a good look around. |