CHRONOS

– A series of seven pictures about
Time, Photography and Reflection

A chronophotographic view on a central avenue in Helsinki. Multiple exposure of five in-camera shots on black and white film. At a concrete level and in the details, the picture shows how time is passing by, through the decomposition of the different movements it contains, but at the same time and as a whole, it has a more abstract level of reading, where the world is seen as a confusing flow of mixed events.

Chronos 1

A pinhole shot on black and white film, from Leith harbour, near Edinburgh. This sepia pigmented picture carries the atmosphere of the early years of photography. The soft texture brought by this technique also reminds us of the Pictorialist movement, which was not only a considerable attempt to make an art form of photography, but also a source of inspiration to me, personally.

Chronos 2

Capture of a contact sheet photograph (of the cathedral of Helsinki), taken with a digital camera through a magnifying glass. As previously in Chronos 2, the style of the original film picture is very pictorialistic, but this one refers more to the history of the techniques of photography, through the presence of the negative perforations.

Chronos 3

Simple picture of an old wall clock. This image is placed in the middle of the series in order to support – by purely visual means – the general theme of Time (Chronos, in Greek). Its simplicity at the centre of the seven pictures also creates a balance and mirror like symmetry between the left and right sides of the series.

Chronos 4

Street view from Helsinki. The process used here is a combination of all first three pictures of the series (multiple exposure, pinhole in sepia, rephotographing through magnifying glass). Here, the marks left by the loupe (the curves of light) make the image creating technique more manifest, somehow symbolizing the temporal evolution of techniques in a simple manner.

Chronos 5

Three keys behind a window reflecting a street view and its car lights. The roughness of this image comes from its relative darkness and the obvious white marks left by the photocopying machine, another stage in the evolution of image reproducing techniques.

Chronos 6

Subjective view of a sculpture called Narkissos, by Björn Weckström (Helsinki, 1982), digital in-camera double exposure. This image ends the series in many ways: technically, it is a purely digital capture, and in that sense, it describes the present. The statue itself has a hybrid nature, half-human, half-machine, but also a dual face, simultaneously turned towards the past and the future, just as photographic art is. Furthermore, the depicted character is Narcissus – and is there any better way to end a photographic chronology than through the eyes of the guy who fell in love with his reflected pictures?

Chronos 7

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