SEQUENCES
As a young artist my interest in sequences came about through a fascination with the work of the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge. His sequential strips and grids of figures in motion, and his invention of the zoopraxiscope, a sequential stop-action screen projection device, led in short order to the invention of cinema.
We look back on his achievements as existing somewhere between photography and filmmaking due to its subtle narrative thrust. Rebecca Solnit, in her insightful book on Muybridge, River of Shadows, foregrounds his intuitive “meditation on time, image and motion”. He was “the man who split the second”, conjuring a sense of moving images before they even existed,
In my formative years as a photographer, particularly in images shot 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 and others, 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 space and time past fixed locations, I created sequences that were at times very closely related in actual time. Second, in a related series, I conjoined images that were consciously separated by ambiguous gaps, with strategic changes in vantage point. I came to think of these works as quasi-narratives, bounded time capsules conjoining a small set of exposures.
Some of the images were shot from windows, 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 other sequences from train cars during a long trip to South America, some from buses in New York City, and a smaller number from inside taxis in heavy traffic. The resulting works are intended to subtly reference the cinematic, with time opened up and then compressed into a single photographic matrix, blending momentary impressions.