Working title “Indecisive Moments,” is an ongoing, ten part project, begun in 2014, involving motion studies, improvisational documentation of our habitat, social capital, behavior, and high culture. These series examine how the act of looking—how we view things—has an influence on what’s being seen. It’s what physics describes as the effect of the observer on the observation.
Recent research suggests that consciousness is a continuous sampling, that the human brain experiences the world in pulses, like the frames in a film. One’s visual understanding depends, in part, on the suspension of disbelief binding them together. The passage of time displayed in a single image, replicates this quantization. As photographer and critic Gerry Badger has said, “Moments are nothing, if not pliable.”
Each panorama represents a continuously changing perspective, multiple moments, a visual stream of consciousness assembled by the digital camera’s software.
What I call a gestural method involves making the photo while moving. The approach is more like a harvest than a shoot. The camera’s movement as well as mine is reflected in the images.
Coincidentally, “Images à la Sauvette,” the original name in French of photographer Cartier-Bresson’s book “The Decisive Moment” translates to “images on the run.”
The series characterize our perturbed habitat (Invasive Species parts 1 & 2, Roadside, and Flora), layered observations (Body Language In the Museum), behavioral landscapes (People Terrain parts 1 & 2), social capital (do you know your neighbor), technical disturbance (In plane view and Subway).
Commonly labelled #glitch, #pano-fail, #jellocam, slit-scan, or rolling shutter, these are hand-held panoramas, no apps or filters are involved.