Busy Busy Busy

I’ve been flat out for the past few days, which is stressful but fun at the same time. After my little winery jaunt at the weekend I tagged along on a shoot and jetted off to Sydney for lunch, as you do, and then back to the grindstone in the evening rehashing those french scripts until my battery died. Today my eyes feel like they haven’t blinked all day and the world looks like I’m staring at a magic eye puzzle. So no fun post and no entertaining links, at least not until my thumping headache subsides.

Paris by Night

It’s about time I posted this somewhere else. It’s the fruit of this summer’s obsession with low light photography, time lapse and Paris. I originally intended it to be a souvenir of the four months I spent there, a sort of visual comfort blanket that I hoped might give me that Paris hit while I was wallowing in the murky depths of suburban English life. So far, it’s worked well. Every scene says so much more than a single frame photograph ever could – more than regular speed video even – and I think it’s precisely this intensity that keeps me spellbound when I watch it, even for the thousandth time. More importantly though, it protects my bank balance when all I want to do is jump on the next Eurostar.

Time travel

b 458
Originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

It’s one of the sad facts of the fourth dimension that we cannot go back in time. Even if we could, it would be impossible to experience everything as we did at the time, because while things and places may appear the same as they were months or years ago, we are not even the same as we were yesterday.

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to go back to a place you loved, years on? Would it still take your breath away? Or have you changed so much you’d wonder what you ever saw in it in the first place?

Defamiliarisation

DSC_0282, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

‘The problem of the artist is to defamiliarise the ordinary’ – Paul Rand, graphic designer.

The familiar consists of the scope of our experience. Outside of these boundaries, we are lost. When what we see doesn’t fit into the rules we order the world by, we’re suddenly out of our depth, forced to reconsider how we think. But how many times can this happen? Surely there comes a point where everything is ordinary, where nothing can be defamiliarised any more?

The moment of defamiliarisation is liberating. The transition from known to unknown, like a cat’s surprise at the wetness as it walks through a puddle, or a child’s realisation that it cannot touch the objects it sees in a mirror.

How can a photo ever succeed in defamiliarising what it portrays? The graphic designer has the advantage of working in a world that is not governed by physics and reality, being able to step outside of the inherent and imposed limitations of the world and into a place ruled only by imagination. By nature a photo has to have an equivalent instant in time and space, that is, it has to be grounded in the ordinary, which makes it so much harder for it to break down the ordinary. I suppose this makes it all the more real as an art form, and easier to identify with, because like us it can’t transcend the limitations of its form.

Movement

sktr 1111, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the shortcomings of photography recently, in particular, movement. Can photos capture movement? We can freeze movement with flash or a fast shutter speed, but that asks the viewer to use their experience of the world to imagine movement; a before and after. Then of course there’s motion blur, which is a step closer to conveying a sense of movement, allowing us to see the subject’s trail from point x to point y.

Although a camera can capture movement in a basic way, it can’t capture more subtle movements. Imagine the gentle flickering of a solitary candle and the shadows its throws dancing on a wall. Or the slow happy blinking of a lover’s eyes, as if they have an eternity to open them again.

By nature photographs record instants, and whether that instant is 1/2000th of a second or 1/10th of a second, it’s still an instant, a finite moment in time. Even a movie, whether it’s 30 seconds or 90 minutes long, is a moment. Now I’m getting onto something more abstract.

Let’s think about movement in the sense of a dynamic; a sort of energy. Where does it start? Where does it come from? Where does it end? Is it possible that there’s a sort of movement that exists in the world that is ultimately uncapturable, invisible? Almost like we’re living on an ongoing timeline with no beginning and no end, and to isolate any part of it would be to take our whole existence out of context, because that would mean giving it a beginning and an end. In that sense, a photo, in fact, any instant, is invalid and irrelevant. It can say nothing, and the only thing that can mean anything is living on that timeline, moving from x to y, in fact just moving, time passing, being, letting time pass through you, and accepting that time cannot be stopped.

Diversity

nhc 19, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

So many worlds, worlds within worlds; absorbing and radiating, accepting and rejecting, opening, closing.

Instants

I often think how strange it is that the instant captured in a photograph can communicate more than an hour-long speech, a day of celebrations or a year of war. It’s fascinating, and sometimes frightening, to see the power that a fraction of a second can have. The instant the shutter releases, by happy coincidence or painstaking planning, a couple of inches of film records a set of shapes that will never be there again. That moment, that light, those people, that movement, those emotions, your camera… all of that will never meet how it did for that 1/60th of a second, and that snapshot can never be relived.

Places, people, feelings; captured ageless in images. My quest for photographs that mean.