A still from I Was Here
2012 | DCP | b/w | 5.1 Surround | 6min
and avoid naive assumptions about it, but it can also make the act of creation more complicated, self awareness might arise as a barrier.
These images were captured during a long afternoon spent sitting in front of the Pantheon in Rome, paced by the sound of a shutter regularly opening and closing for long exposures whose duration was counted off in a whisper.
Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your works? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?
I think of myself as a light hunter using black boxes to trap his prey. With optics and mechanical devices, I capture and shape light to keep a trace of experience.
At precise intervals, the photosensitive surface recorded the constant flow of tourists, peoplewatchers, cars and animals as they moved, stopped, gathered, and took photos. The historic building thus reveals itself as a magnet whose pull on people has lasted for centuries. I Was Here is a reference to the common phrase often found scratched on public walls, marks left as visible proof of a person’s visit to a place.
Whether I work without a camera in the darkroom using enlargers and optical printers or with handcrafted devices, it always has to do with light, lens and some kind of photosensitive surface. Sometimes the ideas arise from making; sometimes they are imagined and planned ahead. In both cases it remains a tedious process and film can be very time consuming. For the series on time exposure that I’m working on, the process of capturing represents the longer part of the work because I can stand beside the came-
Like that age-old practice, travel photography is an attempt to record a person’s presence in a particular place – a photographed place taken home as proof. The soundtrack comes from the same place, but from a different timeline: it was compiled from the audio tracks of amateur videos posted to YouTube. These audio snippets, all recorded in front of the same landmark, tell a collective story through each “I” that has recorded a visit to that same piazza. The clips of murmuring crowds were then edited and manipulated to give them a particular synchronization with the images. 79