Three Minute Adventures in Time and Space
Art has the unique quality of being able to halt the passage of time while still giving the illusion of movement. -Roland Penrose
I have always been fascinated by time and space travel. As a child, I was tremendously influenced by H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Recently, while watching an episode of Dr. Who, a series about a man, known only as the Doctor, who adventures through time and space in a blue telephone box, I realized that this fascination has spilled over into my photography.
Photography is faced with the challenge of representing the passage of time with a static image. Traditionally, photographs are records of a subject’s location and action at an exact point in space and time. Movement is often recorded as a blur. We do not experience movement as a blur. We have only come to recognize blurry images as a representation of movement since the invention of photography.
My photographs represent a different approach to recording time and space. As you look at various parts of the photographs, you are looking at different points in time. In the movement of space from one side to the other, three minutes pass. These are asynchronous photos in which the space and time of the subject change during the exposure. Rather than presenting a visual illusion of suspended time and place, these photographs strive to be more honest by proclaiming that they are out of sync with time and space.
My camera is the box in which I explore matters of time and space. These photographs are my attempt to share my adventures at regional pastimes in a more accurate fashion than conventional photography can provide. The subjects of these pastimes were chosen for their varying and unpredictable amounts of movement of people, animals, and machines. The resultant mixture is simultaneous bizarre and familiar.