SEQUENCES
As a young artist my interest in sequences came about through a fascination with the work of the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Building sequential strips and grids of figures in motion, his seminal work led in short order to the invention of cinema. With its subtle narrative thrust, we look back on his achievements as existing somewhere between photography and filmmaking. As Rebecca Solnit put it in “River of Shadows”, her insightful book on Muybridge, she foregrounds his intuitive “meditation on time, image and motion”. He was “the man who split the second”, conjuring moving images before they even existed,
In my formative years as a photographer, particularly in New York City and South America in the second half of the 1970’s, I was interested in marrying the fleeting instants of street photography, epitomized at the time by Garry Winogrand, to a filmmaker’s sense of interaction between fixed vantage points and the flow of movement. This played out in two essential forms: first, by mapping movement through time and space past fixed locations, I created sequences that were at times very closely related in actual time; and second, by conjoining images that were consciously separated by ambiguous gaps, with strategic changes in vantage point. I came to think of them as bounded time capsules, quasi-narratives conjoining a group of selected exposures.
Some of the images were shot from windows or doors, such as the second-floor window of the loft I lived in on the Bowery in lower Manhattan. That portal provided a place from which to chart the ebb and flow of human activity along the Bowery of the 1970s, a vantage point on a changing river of movement and dysfunction. I shot some sets from train cars during a long trip to South America, others from buses in New York City, and a smaller number from inside taxis in heavy traffic. The resulting sequences are intended to subtly flirt with the cinematic. Time is opened up and then compressed into a single photographic matrix, blending momentary impressions.