There is in fact no such thing as an instantaneous photograph. All photographs are time exposures of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time. This time is always present. Uniquely in the history of pictures, a photograph describes only that period of time in which it was made. Photography alludes to the past and the future only in so far as they exist in the present, the past through its surviving relics, the future through prophecy visible in the present.
Jan Szarkowski 1966 The Photographer’s Eye Introduction
My projects focus on different approaches to ‘photographic time’. Concern to extend my range of skills and techniques in creating and communicating meaning in my work, including:
- cameracraft
- digital styles
‘Reclaim the Night’ looks at how things look different at night. Also experiences of women walking on their own at night in different locations, and the issue of light pollution.
I am interested in:
- different technical approaches to photographic at night, particularly use of long exposures and different types of lighting and flash photography.
- different ways of processing the photographs
Link to activism and ‘making the world a better place’ through the types of images I make, linkages with campaigning organisations, collaborative projects and the ways in which I disseminate the work in different formats to gain wide accessibility to people within UK and globally.
Location Diaries
I focus on a number of locations that I can work on intensively over time from my house or in field visits specifically for these projects.
These projects follow particular location close to home that I can access regularly.
- ‘Timelessness’
- Times of day
- Changing seasons
- Solarpate, cyanotype and screenprints
- Moving image
I am particularly interested in the nature of light at different times, ways in which light changes and the process of digital capture to either record light accurately or camera adjustments to ‘make a better image’. And how this changes with different colours and techniques.
Ways of capturing the present, walking, psychogeography and abstractions of timelessness.
‘Presence of Memory’ looks at different approaches to archival footage, how the images we have of the past affect the ways we remember, and how this affects life in the present and future.
I focus on my own early film and transparency archives from the late 1970s to 2000, and early digital photographs 2009 – 2013 taken on low megapixel compact and DSLR cameras.
I consider:
- the relationship between my archive artifacts, memory and actual events.
- the content and meaning of what I chose to ‘shoot’
- the decisions I made in how to capture the image
- stylistic considerations in presenting this material digitally now in the context of changing photographic technology and styles – why some photographs look old and why, when and how to replicate these ‘nostalgia’ effects digitally.
- Use of Photoshop, DxO FX and Topaz Studio filters to produce ‘art photography’ images using the specific aesthetic of analogue photography, and the textures produced by pixelations and blurs that characterise early digital photography.
- Ways of presenting archive: Collage and Photomontage
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
Walter Benjamin cited in Ori Gersht
“As sites of memory, photographic images (whether digital or analogue) offer not a view on history but, as mnemonic devices, are perceptual phenomena upon which a historical representation may be constructed. Social memory is interfered with by photography precisely because of its affective and subjective status…in terms of history and memory, photographs demand analysis rather than hypnotic reverie’
David Bates ‘The Memory of Photography’.
“reprogramming popular memory, which existed but had no way of expressing itself. So people are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been”
Foucault
Susan Sontag On Photography
Not just past, but what is likely to happen in future.
Street Photography and documentary
What do I shoot, when and why?
Shutter speeds, focus and action.
Inspiration Stephen Gill: trail cam and birds