Field Trip Magazine

This week saw the launch of Field Trip Magazine; the first of edition of which is dedicated to analogue photography and includes a small selection of photographs taken from my latest film Traversal - Third Passage. The film Traversal - Third Passage is the third instalment of a trilogy of work occupied with the Australian landscape as perceived from the train window as I travelled from Melbourne to Darwin and back again.

All elements of Traversal are in some way are concerned with exploring perception and blurring the boundaries between the still and moving image. In Third Passage, a film made from 54 single photographs, the still image is animated and gives the viewer no opportunity for the considered observation of the single image which we tend to expect from photography. Instead in the film the 54 still images flick by in a frenzy of changing patterns and rhythms that build towards an overwhelming crescendo. 

In Field Trip Magazine 12 of these images are isolated and time is frozen on the page giving opportunity for observation of these normally fleeting photographs.

The spread as it appears in Field Trip Magazine, Issue 1, Summer 2010.

Ideas / thoughts on Traversal: A work in progess part two

I have been thinking about the work of Tacita Dean and how it relates to some of the concerns I am interested to explore in the project Traversal. While researching Dean’s work recently, I came across a number of short texts she has written that are included in the final section of a book published by Phaidon. The text that I found most interesting and perhaps most enlightening about her practice is entitled Tristan da Cunha. In it Dean writes of her fantasy of visiting the most remote island in the world, which is apparently Tristan da Cunha, to be left there for a year without any form of communication with the outside world, apart from the mail boat which appears once a year. She re-tells a dream, where she had the realisation that when the mail boat arrived, it would also be the same boat that would mark the end of her year and facilitate her return home; this thought of leaving panicked her and she felt disappointed at the letters she could not send or receive – of all the news she could not get.

Not only is the journey (so far) an unrealised fantasy, but also a fantasy of a world where you can get lost; as Dean explains, even Tristan da Cunha has a satellite public phone and the governor now has email. So time moves relentlessly on for this remote and distant land too. It is clear to see from the text that Dean hungers for these spaces where one can dream of becoming lost, where linear time has little meaning and the past and the future are all somehow present in the now. In conclusion Dean writes, ‘So I realize, suddenly, what is at the heart of this draw to the Earth’s edges – to the desert and to the sea, or to the ice at the bottom of the world, or the volcano risen out of the ocean. In these places, we are not bound by the rules of human time; we can be free of a history that cannot mark a surface in constant flux like that of the sea or the or the shifting dunes of the desert, or one brutalized by weather or extremity. In these places, we can imagine millennia; we can image prehistory and can see the future.’

Accompanying the text are reproductions of an old postcard and photograph, both images of an unstated location or date, both have German words painted in white across them indicating aspects of what is pictured.


Tacita Dean, Himmel/See, 2005.


Tacita Dean, Luft/Immergrune/Sandboden, 2005.

For me Dean’s fascination with time resonates with Henri Bergson concept of durée (duration): the dynamic movement of passing yet continuing time, in other words time that is not divisible into past and future, but is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is this concept of durée that is in my mind when I consider some of the still images from Traversal.


Sam Nightingale, Untitled (Traversal series)