Photograph: Response to John Stezaker’s Crowd (2013) November 2017
This is a photograph taken in 2017, a 1/4 of a second exposure of John Stezaker’s film Crowd, exhibited at the City Gallery as part of John Stezaker: Lost World. The film is composed entirely of individual frames of crowd scenes from different movies, projected rapidly. In this sense, film stills are extracted, made independent, then re-contextualised to exist within a filmic state; that is, moving. Humans are supposed to see individual images appearing at this rate of 1/24th of a second. However, I experienced the imagery to flash before my eyes so quickly that I felt overwhelmingly disconcerted at being unable to grasp the entirety of the image. I could realise only fragments of the whole before the image moved and changed relentlessly. In other words, time and image was unceasingly progressing, resulting in my inability to comprehend the present. I photographed such, only to look at again once time had lapsed, once I was removed from the immediate experience. This is the resultant image, observed for the first time this morning. I think this particular affair is a microcosm of photography’s value and necessity in my life; able to document a moment in time when I find myself too absorbed to make sense of such, which later manifests its beauty, value, meaning, importance, artistic significance. Through this photograph I have extended the aforementioned relationship between image and film further, translating essence of the film back into a still; yet infused with its peripheral imagery.
Photograph: Response to John Stezaker’s Crowd (2013) November 2017
This is a photograph taken in 2017, a 1/4 of a second exposure of John Stezaker’s film Crowd, exhibited at the City Gallery as part of John Stezaker: Lost World. The film is composed entirely of individual frames of crowd scenes from different movies, projected rapidly. In this sense, film stills are extracted, made independent, then re-contextualised to exist within a filmic state; that is, moving. Humans are supposed to see individual images appearing at this rate of 1/24th of a second. However, I experienced the imagery to flash before my eyes so quickly that I felt overwhelmingly disconcerted at being unable to grasp the entirety of the image. I could realise only fragments of the whole before the image moved and changed relentlessly. In other words, time and image was unceasingly progressing, resulting in my inability to comprehend the present. I photographed such, only to look at again once time had lapsed, once I was removed from the immediate experience. This is the resultant image, observed for the first time this morning. I think this particular affair is a microcosm of photography’s value and necessity in my life; able to document a moment in time when I find myself too absorbed to make sense of such, which later manifests its beauty, value, meaning, importance, artistic significance. Through this photograph I have extended the aforementioned relationship between image and film further, translating essence of the film back into a still; yet infused with its peripheral imagery.