Time and photography
Time and photography
2010
Photography freezes the moment: the time dimension can only be interpreted from any action underway when the shutter clicks. As a filmmaker, I yearn to get more of a sense of movement into my photos, so I have experimented, on and off, with techniques that ‘capture’ movement in the still frame.
The quality of digital photography, the price of the cameras, and the sheer number of people out there taking photographs is overwhelming. The opportunities to share photographs have exploded. Some photographers have responded to this by making photographs that are unrecognisable as images. Maybe this parallels what happened to painting and painters when photography was first invented in the early 19th century. According to David Hockney, when representation could be handled technically with the camera, film and a dark room, painters had to find new spaces to explore. In the early 20th century, there was Impressionism. Painters used their craft to present ideas that could not actually be seen except through their painting.
With the overwhelming numbers of images available through the Internet these days, photographers and artists, and photographers who are artists, find themselves looking for novel ways of presenting images. If you compare the tourist photos of a particular place with marketing images of that same place, there may be a different approach to representing the experience the photographer has had of that place. Tourist photos tend to have their travelling companions included: marketing shots, if they have people in them, they tend to be less recognizable that in the tourists shots. The marketing photos highlight the beauty of the scene.
While walking the Milford track in New Zealand, I was keen to collect photographs of the area and share them through Panoramio on Google Earth.
The photographs are mainly documentary of the area and the trip: straightforward images that remind me of the place and the experience. I also did some experimental images that, to me, represent the experience unlike the pin-sharp, documentary images. They are much more personal and evocative images.
Milford Track in the rain. 15 April 2010 Photo James Steele
Since the track is extremely popular, many walkers have uploaded their geotagged images to Panoramio so the area is richly represented on Google Earth. The Panoramio photo layer on Google Earth is populated through a manual selection process: Panoramio subscribers upload their images to the site, and a person looks through them, selecting appropriate images for display. Photographs on Panoramio selected for display have a small blue compass badge on them indicating their selected status.
The process for selecting geotagged images from Panoramio for display on Google Earth is documented on the Panoramio website. Of particular note is the acceptance policy: the rules the person selecting images for display on Google Earth use to determine the photograph’s status.
It is interesting to explore the rules for acceptance of Panoramio photos in relation to these ‘abstract’ images. The policies reflect a particular approach to what images represent place, and how place can be represented. I would argue that textures, close-ups and abstracted images can also communicate important visual and impressionistic clues to viewers about a place.
My not-so-frozen moments photos do not get selected for display on Google Earth, but to me they provide an interpretation of the place that goes beyond that which traditional ‘realistic’ photographs can convey to a viewer.
On Milford Sound, I took more of these images, which are made by using the lowest ISO setting on the camera possible, the narrowest aperture, and the longest shutter speed. In some photos (Waterfall), the zoom is operated to add a different sense of movement.
Waterfall. 17 April 2010 Photo James Steele
Both subject and camera movement during the exposure produces a different effect: Seagulls is an even more abstract image created by the movement of the birds during the exposure.
Seagulls. 17 April 2010 Photo James Steele
Homer Tunnel, Milford Sound, is made by the vibrations of the bus in which I was travelling through a road tunnel on the way out of the Milford Sound area.
Homer Tunnel, Milford Sound. 17 April 2010 Photo James Steele
Probably my favourite image of the series of works is Green — road trip. Taken through the window of the bus as we left the Milford Track, it signifies to me the rushing away from the relaxing and invigorating days of walking, back to a more usual, rushed existence.
Green — road trip. 18 April 2010 Photo James Steele
No-so-frozen moments
3/05/10
In the early 1970s I visited Canberra (I was then living in Sydney) and experimented with slow shutter speed effects on my film SLR camera. This is Canoeists at the Cotter. In 2010 on the Milford Track I experimented further with the technique.