Bright White Light

We are both particles and waves. We flow through each other in our four dimensions. Stillness is density. Motion is light.

Bright White Light is a collection of ‘wide moment’ street portraits taken in conditions that lead to overexposure, colour blends and shifts, and a four-dimensional representation of people in a two-dimensional space. These are single exposures; I also create large composites of crowds from hundreds of photos, called Bright Timewarps.

For reasons both aesthetic and political I began experiments with long exposures of people about 12 years ago. I had taken street photographs for decades and learned to find the sharp, decisive moment of culminating motion and emotion. But I wanted a way to avoid exploiting people by seizing their image and turning them into art. The emerging shapes and colours, and the way this series of techniques shifted my understanding of time, led me to develop this body of work. Time and light are the basic elements of photography. Humans have a certain clock rate to determine the meaning of ‘now’. If we shift this rate we see the world differently, but it is no less real. These images trace the relationship between subjects, their motion through the world, and my moving lens. Looking at these images is like a light puzzle, and the engaged viewer must decode it in a way to infer what is happening from the clouds of colour.

These exposures show the world from a perspective we can’t witness without a camera. This is one way art in general and photography in particular can increase our capacity to understand and enjoy our world. It is real, and seems unreal. We can question our permanence, or the nature of time, our physical manifestations in a four dimensional space. Or we can simply suspend reason and appreciate the colour and flow of our multidimensional humanity.