Weathering Time
July 3 – 28, 2019
What started out as a simple question in 1982 became the impetus for Weathering Time: ‘What would it be like to photograph myself every day and watch myself grow older?’ I was twenty-five years old at the time…
My methodology was simple: I chose a 50 mm lens aimed directly at me to keep distortion to a minimum; my body was shown from head to toe. For the first thirty-six years I used a film camera. If I failed to take a picture on a given day, I advanced the film one frame so no image was recorded. Each roll of film captured one month. There were many days, some months, and even three years when I did not take pictures. The missed days were mostly because I forgot. In my 1984 journal I wrote that I did not photograph ‘the rest of May’ because I was ‘burnt out.’
In 1991, 1992, and 1995 there are no self-portraits. I simply lost interest in the project. Thankfully, in January 1996 I realized the personal importance of my archive and started up again. While I still miss days, weeks, and an occasional month, I plan to continue the self-portraits as long as I am able.
For a while I saw my pictures as simply daily documents of what I looked like, but my process evolved over the years.
In 2006 I began using a point-and- shoot digital camera when I travelled or went backpacking for extended periods of time. In 2019 I moved away from film and now shoot exclusively with a digital camera. Beginning in 2012 and continuing today, I occasionally reenact a particular image in the archive to contrast the changes over time. Finally, I am adding old family photographs from my parents’ archive.
The resulting visual calendar now consists of more than 2,500 photographs. Most often I’m by myself in these images, but sometimes I’m with family and friends. As time passes, births, deaths, celebrations, and bad days happen. Pets come and go, fashions and hairstyles evolve, typewriters, analogue clocks, and telephones with cords disappear; film gives way to digital, and the computer replaces the darkroom.
While Weathering Time chronicles my youth to the dawn of my old age, the images also reflect the experiences of my generation and underscore the cultural, technological, and physical changes that have occurred over the past forty years.
Nancy Floyd uses photography, video, and mixed-media to address the ways in which lens-based media can connect deeply with experience and memory. Much of her work addresses the passage of time, representations of women, and the aging female body. More recently she’s begun a wide-ranging exploration of trees and the people who care for and study them.
Floyd has received numerous grants and awards including a 2024 Victoria & Albert Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2018 Aaron Siskind Photography Fellowship and a 2014 John Gutmann Photography Fellowship.
In 2021, Floyd’s 39-year self-portrait series, Weathering Time, was published by the International Center of Photography and GOST books and the work was featured in the New Yorker Photobooth.
Floyd’s artwork is in the collection of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art (Salem, OR), the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL), Lightwork (Syracuse, NY), and in numerous private collections.
Floyd holds a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from Columbia College Chicago, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She is Emerita Professor in the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University in Atlanta and lives in Bend, Oregon.