Final Major Project

For this project we were asked to produce our own project brief, we were able to work in any medium relating to photography and the ideas and concepts we could convey were purely our own creation. i quickly began having many idea's but one that i felt certain i wanted to convey was one which i had heard archetectual photographer Julius Shulman about, the way he described it was;

 "the passage of time and light lets you understand space, through photography you can understand time"


i was taken with this idea and started researching it, i found allot of photographers subscribe to this notion and talk about it in there work. aswell as this i stumbled across a french anthropologist named Marc Auge and found that in his studies he had used this idea and applied an extreme of it to certain places. the idea stands as there being places built for purpose which change little yet are perhaps the most unique places in the world whilst at the same time becoming unidentifiable from similar places to it. for example a french motorway will look very similar to an american motorway, although there will be subtle differences. i was quickly taken with this idea and started researching other parts of the theory. there was a section on time and entropy which quickly focused on because of what i began looking at. i watched a lecture by Sean Carroll called the arrow of time in which it explained the ideas around time within locaion and that we see time in relation to event that take place, 12pm is an event and ambiguous when you start to think about it's relation without knowing when it takes place. carroll questions whether time takes place if there are no events around it to keep track of whether it is taking place.
he talks about whether time is a pnentrative force or whether time is dependant on people observing it. the basic form of the theory is "if a tree falls in the forest and knowone is around to hear it does it make a sound"

form this i decided to photograph an area talked about as a non-place by marc auge but apply Shulman and Carrolls ideas to it. i decided to shoot it over and over again from the same view point and see whether by the end of it i wold produce the same image over and over, or whether there would be noticable differences, even when the time of day and weather is changed.

i decided for my location to use a classic example of Auge's non-space an photograph a flyover in shoreham. it is an area i have photographed before an one which i feel is an area of little chang. i also chose it for the fact that no-one walks there and it is kept seperate from the main road.

 this shot taken in november of last year is the basis of my shoot although this time i want to shoot it on medium format colour transparency due to the colour and tonal range of the material. i also think this time i will use my 6x8 back and shoot it portrait to greater capture size and shape of the concrete pillars. because i am going to be going back over a period of time i will use polaroids so i will be able to get the same shades of light and dark even with the change of the weather and lighting conditions. i also hope given my better understanding of compisition i will be able to get a more complete image of the the location without cutting off parts, as has happened in this image. this will be difficult because i do not want to use a wide-angle lens as i don't want the effect it gives and moving the camera back is difficult  due to limited space.

  I have now done my shoot, these are the polaroids i took durring the week. i made sure after each was taken i made a note of the time and date they where taken in order to be sure of the timeline of my photography. i was surprised by how much the colour changed day to day and i quickly began thinking about subtle changes in the colour to surgest the different times of day. one thing i was certain of after reveiwing the polaroid was that these where not going to look like the same photograph over and over, but by letting the world move around the location i was able to capture a different photograph every time. this linked back up on my idea of the location staying exactly the same while the world simply changed the situation around it.

i scanned in my negatives, i would have produced the images in the darkroom but the process isn't available at college. i used the flextight scanner because it's neg-holder doesn't have a glass front thus eliminating unnecessary marks and imperfection. over the course of the 10 day shoot schedule i shot two films. Picking the right transparencies was difficult, i decided to pick ones which would show the course of the day, morning midday and evening. i chose the 2nd of may, 4th of may and the 6th. in this way i was able to show a relatable 
narrative yet with a new twist by being stretched out over a week. in this way i examined colour at these different times.  i found that the colours basically went warm in the morning and afternoon whilst being cooler midday. i started to add subtle colour casts to surgest these times.

when i first started researching the idea's behind this project i found allot of famous photographers who had used the same idea to influence projects they had done. one of these was Irving Penn and his series of frozen food made into blocks. i thought this series related greatly to my own project. using photography penn had been able to freeze a moment in time, capturing something that was quite litterally also forzen in time. i had frozen a priod of time which whilst wasn't frozen there was still no noticable movement or illusion of time passing. although penns studio still life style is very different to my own it still got me thinking about my concept as a deeper meaning and in particular the organic nature i had haptured in parts of my images. i started thinking about the concrete being at a juxtaposition to the bushes and trees in the background, and in particular the way these aspects stop once the fly-over's presence becomes more noticable. almost as if the act of buiding it was the very thing which took a clear sence of time out of the location.

This is part of a series named city of shadows by Alexey Titarenko, in this series Titarenko used black and white medium format with long exposures to create this effect of stillness in everything but the people, are extremely blurred. using this process Titarenko is able to produce this sort of ghostly image of a city. the sharpness of the stairs and railings at contrast to the grey swarm that is the crowd, and the hands on the railings still ghostly but the most recognizable part of them gives the sense on humanity being indistinguishable from one another yet also the idea of location having power over humanity with it's strong image  compared to the soft wash of grey. i feel this image connects very well to the ideas within my project, as i want to do titarenko is looking at location with event around it, and even with the events around it the area is still unchanged, although he has chosen a spot to make it obvious of things moving through the space, where as i am trying to find an area with little outside influence.

 another photographer i feel i am using a similar technique to is Nicholas Nixon, specifically his "the brown sisters" series. in this series Nixon photographed his wife and her sisters since the early 1980's with the body of work released in 2002, although work hasn't been seen it is possible that he continues to photograph them. this is one of the most interesting series i have ever seen and relate strongly to my idea, mine is a project based on location and is essentially doing the same thing. with nixon's work you can look through some photographs and see little difference, in others the change is remarkable. this is what i would intend to do with a longer time scale to work with build up on subtle changes from image to image until the place is (on reflection) quite obviously changed. through this technique nixon has done (as i intend to also do)
 captured the passing of time.

once i had made subtle changes to parts of the colour on photoshop i used the sharpen tool to bring out some of the detail of the film which you lose in the scanner. i decided to print the images as large as possible whilst still having borders. i went for a1 paper, the reson behind this was because i wanted to let people examin the detail and changes more closely. i decided to use a frame with window mounts because i wanted to remove the image from the outside world as to accentuate the idea of unique location frozen in time. i did however choose to remove the glass from the front because i wanted people to be able to investigate the image without having to look past reflections. the title of my images are a undisernable merge of numbers, for example; one taken on the 4th of may 2011 at 9:36 will have the title "452011936". i chose to do this because i wanted to have the time and date on show but without people being able to recognize it, JME McTaggart (writer of "the unreality of time") theorized that time was relative to events around it an idea also mentioned by Carroll. using this idea i am trying to challenge peoples perception of time, challenging my idea of time was the most interesting part of this project for me.

i feel that my images are faithful to my original idea. i set out to show a place changing whilst staying the same. i chose a place of hicgh activity yet low entropy. my favourite of the three images is the one taken on the 4th, i find the hard light coming in on the right pillar is very surgestive, to me it makes me think of time sliding into the location, and this is the part i am happiest about. having first been inspired by julius shulman saying;

"the passage of time and light lets you understand space, through photography you can understand time"

, i feel that i have acheived this idea. i am happy with the fact that i have taken the same image over and over and so much yet so little has changed in each one. I think i will continue this project and photograph this space over the coming weeks, months and years.