Slow photography in New Zealand

"The joy of using these cameras though was the feeling of magic – the silence of light flooding through the pinhole as I peeled back the cardboard shutter was a beautiful antithesis to the click and wind of a film camera or the stuttering beeps of digital. Because the aperture which allows light into the tin is so small, and the paper not as sensitive as film, the negatives have to be exposed for a long time (around thirty seconds in sunlight) and this pushed me towards brief periods of meditation as I exposed them, sitting very still, counting the seconds and looking intently at the subject of the photograph. Sitting or kneeling even for half a minute makes you aware of so much more around you. The snow chills the knee which bears most of your body weight, you notice the movement of insects in the grass, the rain beats harder on your hood."

Source: Photo essay: Slow photography in New Zealand / Chris Mackie / October 19, 2011

Henry David Thoreau / Tuer le temps

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."

Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Walden, 1854

Merry Xmas and Happy Slow Year !

Broomberg et Chanarin / Slow photographes

"(...) Using huge rolls of photographic paper, the duo [Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin] made vast exposures of various scenes in the conflict without using a camera – instead keeping the media in darkness and then exposing it to the natural light of whatever environment they wanted to depict. The photographs themselves reach so far into the idea of abstraction that the need for the viewer to be informed of their aim is central to their success or failure, as the majority of the images do not reflect any traditional notion of visual description. (...)
Their work, along with that of other photographers such as Hiroshi Sugimoto and Atta Kim (whose individual endeavours have focused on the removal of the temporary through long exposure photography) (28) , can be described in the area of ‘Slow Photography,’ as noted by writer Peter Brook (29). This idea looks directly at the variation in immediacy between art and photojournalism, and points to photojournalism’s search for the definitive moment being the antithesis of what the work of these conceptual photographers is concerned with a sentiment with which Broomberg agrees, stating (30):
“All we're doing is giving people warning, letting the subjects represent themselves instead of pretending to catch 'the defining moment' that speaks the unwitting truth. The point is we're being self-conscious about our intervention, about the fact that it is a mediatedhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif truth.”

28 - Rexer, Lyle. The Edge of Vision - The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (New York: Aperture, 2009) - Page 184-185
29 - Brook, Peter. Slow Photography: Broomberg and Chanarin, Prison Photography, Posted October 16th 2009, Retrieved November 19th 2009 (http://prisonphotography.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/slow-photography-broomberg-and-chanarin)
30 - 'Trusting the Truth' at Johannesburg Art Gallery (Gallery Listing), ArtThrob.co.za, Posted September 25th 2007, Retrieved November 19th 2009 (http://www.artthrob.co.za/03apr/listings_gauteng.html)

Source: A MEDIUM AT WAR | AN ANALYSIS OF PHOTOGRAPHY’S RELATIONSHIP WITH HUMAN CONFLICT / JAMES PORTEOUS

Etre creatif demande du temps