What I learned from that first 45-second-long exposure I made years ago is that the camera records a world different from the one we experience because it does not record emotion — it only sees the world in strange, artificial, frozen slices of time.
Consider our emotions. No one is instantaneously angry or instantaneously bored. Those emotions take time to build in response to what’s going on around us, as experienced over time. Our world exists as a continuum, not a snapshot. Our bodies respond to the world in a cumulative way, averaging our experience as we pass through time.
David Hockney once said, “Duration is life, and the photograph has no duration. It is dead in that sense. All photographs share the same flaw: lack of time.”
By using long exposures, I have been able to encode the element of time in what would otherwise be a static image, revealing what our world “looks” like based on a longer time scale. My photographic process acts as a translator, translating the “invisible” world of non-instantaneous events into the visible world of a photographic print.