David Burrows

PHOTOGRAPHY

Crepuscule

2013

Medium Format Positive Transparency Light Boxes

The goal of this project is to create a series of positive transparency photographic works exploring the transitional qualities of celestial of light over a period of time.

My intent is to capture the changing light conditions bridging night and day as a single elongated, long-exposure image.

My hope is to create a panoramic vision of time, seen as a sweeping horizon depicted in shifting gradations of hue and luminosity. I wish to reveal the spectacular dance of crepuscular light. I am intrigued by the ambiguity and poetic potential of these cusp moments, the ungraspable edges of times measurable units where definition dissolves, clarity disintegrates and vision becomes the trickster.

Shot in a unique extended format that utilizes an entire roll of film as a single frame, this project required the construction of a device to scroll the entire roll through the camera with the shutter open. Thus exposing the film as it spools past the aperture in a technique similar to slit-scan photography.

The intention of this work is to compress time into a single frame and to present the subtlety and the wonder of the spectral transition of celestial light between night and day. These works challenge traditional modes of reading a photograph since they engender a temporal narrative cast across a spatial format; the elongated slides read as wide, sweeping horizons spanning interwoven time zones. The movement of the film (and in one occasion the camera too) abstracts the landscape into horizontal plains, which although being distortions of Lake Ranfurly, still resemble the experience of the place.