Unnamed Twenty One, 2017 — Sidelong :: (click to see more)
Wait a sec – I’m not interested in the intersection of time and rhythm, like I said last week – it’s just rhythm.
Time is a factor of rhythm not a separate element – so are cycles, so is movement, so is pattern. This is why music is so strongly linked. It’s full of pattern and rhythm – on all levels, music is entirely comprised of rhythm.
I do think time is fascinating but it’s an element of my main interest. However, rhythm couldn’t properly exist outside the framework of time – without the expression of time rhythm becomes pattern.
And Alignment is rhythm too – on a different scale… perhaps.
What an A-HA! moment.
Unnamed Twenty, 2017 — Sidelong :: (click to see more)
This morning I was considering what shape my next project might be. While I’m still very much interested in the intersection of time and rhythm I’m not certain how else to address them. They’re both fairly abstract concepts photographically and well, the resulting five bodies of work have been abstract too.
I’ve long been drawn to another form of intersection – which I’ve mentioned in the past as Alignment – when disparate elements unite to form a sum greater than the parts. This too is time based in that it can only happen at the right moment and is typically fleeting. I consider Alignment part of the quantum universe – ie when not observed it’s doesn’t necessarily happen but rather is a probable outcome. Photographically, Alignment is both figurative and representative but usually not thematically bound – therefore difficult to gather into a full complement.
Unnamed Eight, 2017 — Side Slide :: (click to see more)
There’s always an urgency for me when I’m shooting. Most of what I see in the world is fleeting and short lived – a momentary alignment where the light, the shadow, the subject, the colour, the framing – all of it are perfect. Where it matches my mind’s eye.
When I first began as a photographer this really frustrated me. I could almost never move fast enough to capture these elusive moments. My equipment was much slower then and I was not as familiar with it as I am now. But faster equipment could only take me so far. At one point, I imagined having a continuous image stream would solve the problem – that I could later sift through to find that perfect moment. But I soon realized that idea was so problematic it would make more trouble than it solved.
In the end I got familiar with the circumstances that might lead to a moment and would prepare myself in the hope it would actually happen. It became mostly a waiting game.
Ironically, my last four bodies of work have incorporated all of these methods, including a mediated continuous image stream – where I pull the trigger often during the right circumstances, trying to catch the perfect alignment.
Two Yellow Stripes And Arc On Green, 2012 – Light Signatures :: (Click to see more)
For a long time I’ve thought of my creative interests in terms of coincident cycles or alignments. Everything – literally everything around us, is in constant motion at some level and often on multiple levels. My thinking is all this movement has rhythm and is cyclical in nature – that interesting things happen when these cycles coincide, reinforce or cancel each other – like interference patterns in waves. I’ve always thought of the coincident cycles as alignments. Similar to how the planets cycle around the sun and from time to time align in interesting ways presenting us with spectacular eclipses.
I consider the constant movement and cycling of everything around me as chaotic noise – at times overwhelming – at others simply awesome. When I began to think more deeply about the kinds of things I was photographing and the why of it, I started to think about my method, the attractions for me and my state of mind as I worked. I noticed when I was most focused and centered within I was most adept at sensing and anticipating alignments in the elements around me – that it was the alignments that drew me in. These were the moments when interesting things happened. The alignments had a symmetry to them – they were an abrupt and tenuous formation of order in the otherwise apparently chaotic movement around me. They were little eddies of calm in a stormy sea of activity.
In a way, I think of the movement of everything as a complex sound wave. I believe it was Fourier who discovered that all sound waves could be deconstructed into individual sine waves no matter how complex the sound. I think all the seemingly chaotic movement around me can be similarly broken down into individual orderly cycles – just as sound waves can.
Frankly I’m not interested in breaking down the movements of things into their individual cycles – although at times I will become fascinated with the repetitive movement of some individual thing – I am really only interested in the cool things that result when all these movements intersect and align – hence, the summation of my actions as – order from chaos.