Time Frames, Panoramas and Grids
April 10 – May 6, 1987
Excerpted from my book Time Frames – City Pictures, 2002 powerHouse books:
My perception of the urban experience is structured through the formal elements implied by a range of concepts pertaining to camera vision and temporality. The city with its densely populated streets, diverse architecture and overall vibrancy offers an exciting visual field to explore subject, content, and space. I extended these photographic possibilities by emphasizing the notion of time with panning lenses and sequential recordings. I sought to define and create relations within the conceptual framework of extended duration on a single negative.
More Compositional Space or 1400
My work has always aimed to organize the frame to include multiple views and moments, but it was the difficulties of photographing people with the panoramic camera that first structured my inquiry. The elongated frame with its two-point perspectives encouraged the seamless grouping of figures within 140 degrees of city space. The photographic language of the wide-angle picture had tremendous potential which was further enriched by the time required for the panning lens of the camera to complete its exposure. Thus, the additional element of duration was inflected in the final image. The idea that a photograph could represent more than an instant fascinated me and became a central interest in my work.
Spatiality into Temporality
After years of photographing strangers with the panorama and establishing a dimension of tension between time and space, I began to photograph with a sequence camera to investigate further the idea of extended duration within a single photograph. I adapted an eight-lens camera — originally designed to capture the sequential movement of a subject — to convey grids which establish both continuity and disruptions in movement and subject matter. The succession of eight exposures, within a predetermined time of twenty-eight seconds on a single sheet of film, demanded a pre-visual conceptualization and anticipation of visual incidents as they unfolded. The experience of walking down a street, looking left, right, up, down, while moving in and out of scenes was like a cubist jazz riff, a response to the city that described my non-linear movement through urban spaces.