Stream 12025

For the Stream series I walked up streams on the rural island where I live, capturing footage of water tumbling over rocks and debris with a digital cinema camera on a hand-held gimbal. Purpose-written software extracted frames from the video at regular intervals, and stacked them sequentially bottom to top. Each frame is overlapped by the one following, leaving only a narrow strip visible, until the final topmost frame in which the full view of the camera is revealed.

What results is a durational depiction of a length of terrain not visible from a single perspective. The stream that in reality winds and bends and climbs and falls is straightened and flattened by the camera's perspective travelling along it, and disrupted by the motion of my body struggling to navigate its slippery, uneven bed. There is no digital manipulation of the images, only the stacking of frames in successive layers.

These are images of landscapes through time, but they are also explorations of the technical means that make such an image possible. Photography is always a time-based medium, even when used to take a single photograph. The camera arrests our sense of time from a perpetual flow, dividing it into successive presents, depicting a reality that reflects the anatomy of the mechanical apparatus itself.