William Oldacre Photography

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Paraphrase

Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, red, blue, green , muted, streaks, waves, pattern

Rolling Wave Under Belly, 2014 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

I believe my current fascination with movement stems from an interest in context. I remember years ago reveling in the notion of ambiguous context in images. By cropping an image down to some small element of the original you can find extraordinary but unidentifiable form and texture. Like tiny sound bites of a larger whole.

The irony – this is essentially what photography already does. It is the original sound bite tool – okay, image bite. Photographs encapsulate and frame the larger world, the larger experience and through various methods tell a story or perhaps more accurately riff on the original story providing a sub-narrative.

The idea of focusing in on small elements of texture and form has led me to where I am now making zoomed in images of movement – sub-narratives of the whole city.

If you think about it, deciding on the story is an arbitrary drawing of the line. At some point you say – oh here is the subset of everything of which I am paraphrasing this small part – but how inclusive of everything do you get? The same holds true in the opposite direction – at what point do you stop paraphrasing, producing the smallest granule of the story – perhaps at the pixel or even the quantum particle?

I’ve decided, for my own reasons, to draw the larger boundary at the city and so far, the smaller boundary at my narrowly focused transient movements through it.