TANGIBLE TIME

"What you see in my images is not space but tangible time.

I took these photos with a self-developed digital slit-cam; they are not the results of a digital photo manipulation.

With the slit-scan technique, a fraction of a moment is recorded through a 1-pixel wide slit several hundred times per second. The time and space slices recorded this way and placed right next to each other generate an image without a perspective; it is the passing of time itself that turns into space by moving forward in time from the right side toward the left in each image.

In other words, the events recorded on the right side of the image took place earlier than the ones on the left, also meaning that the people in the photos never existed together in the form shown by the image. So the people in the right-hand side of the image had grown several minutes older by the time the people seen in the left side passed my camera.

As a result of this time-space connection, all the people and vehicles in the photos are heading in one direction. The time indicated beside the images is the time it tool to record the image.

This method is capable of recording movement only. All the static objects appear as stripes and lanes, like the windows of city buildings in the background.

Photo-finish cameras operate based on the very same principle, so I could also say I took photo-finishes during the preparation of this series in an urban environment without a finish line and ranks."

i'm not a real fan of manipulated images. technically, the manipulation occurs here as the shots are taken, not in the darkroom. he's kind of constructed a cage-ian prepared camera. i can't see how far he can take this but i'm attracted to the images precisely for their uncanny rendering of urban space.