Stream 12025

To create this series of work I filmed streams in the natural surroundings where I live on Salt Spring Island. With a digital cinema camera on a hand-held gimbal, and knee-high rubber boots on my feet, I walked up the streams capturing continuous video of the water tumbling over rocks and debris towards the staggering lens. Then purpose-written software extracted frames from the video at regular intervals, and stacked them sequentially in digital layers, 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 then 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 video 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 discretized into units that reflects the anatomy of the mechanical apparatus itself. I don't propose to do the contrary with these works, rather I aim to push photography towards a limit, to make its technical nature more explicit and to reflect on its role in constructing our shared image of the world.