structures & spectres

structures & spectres is a place where I put images. 

Images that I have taken sometime ago, 

not long ago, 

or even yesterday.
No words, 

just images left to speak for themselves.   

Have a look: 

structures & spectres

In Time @ 272 High Holborn Oct 15 & 16

In Time is a group show that explores the subject of time and is taking place this Friday and Saturday at Blueprint, 272 High Holborn, London, WC1V 7EY.

The show comprising screenings, installation and performance seeks to examine time as duration, material, and as concept and process.

RSVP: info@samnightingale.com


Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life will be screened during the exhibition, between 5.30 - 6.30pm on Friday 15th October and again on Saturday 16th of October between 2.30 - 3.30pm.

Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life addresses time through the relationship between the still and moving image. The film looks at the concept of time as it is first arrested in the still photographic image (as a moment that is isolated and taken out of time) and then (re)animated as a moving image in digital video. This experimental film takes the analogue photograph as its source material and transforms the still-ness of photography into the dynamic movement of film. 

Olympic Changes originates from six medium-format photographic negatives taken from a moving train. Each of the negatives were digitally scanned and repeatedly divided and cropped to make 600 separate images – each becoming a frame in the film. Movement is re-animated through digital video to reflect the play of motion present at the original moment of capture. The frames of the film are sequenced in such a way that the viewer not only journeys through the changing urban landscape, but also journeys through each of the six still photographs. Witnessed is the banality of an everyday train journey, entwined with the structural changes taking place to the urban environment around the Olympic site in East London.


Further details concerning In Time can be found at: http://intimeexhibition.wordpress.com/

A reflection on Les Rencontres d'Arles photography festival

I attended Les Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in the south of France during it's opening week: 7th - 12th July. This is one of the largest photography festivals in the world and attracts a varied crowd both in terms of those actively participating, be that photographers exhibiting their work, publishers looking for the next new talent or those attending portfolio reviews hoping to be discovered as the next new talent. For many others visiting Les Roncontres it is to see a plethora of work from both familiar and unfamiliar names in the word of photography. During the opening week Arles becomes a town that is unable to hide from an onslaught of cameras; every time you turn a corner someone is photographing something. The festival and those attending became a spectacle - framed by the medium it is celebrating.

The image appears highly privileged at Les Rencontres. An image which is frequently detached from the context of it's making. It seems an image that relies on itself alone and without desire for much self-reflexivity.

Can we really put this much trust or emphasis in the image alone? Should we not expect some critical investigation of the who/why/where of it's making? I know that I expected this to be the case for a photography festival who states in its strap-line celebrating 40 year of its existence, that it is also a festival offering '40 years of disruption'. I wonder about this claim, as surely the act of disruption is also in its nature questioning the thing it is attempting to unsettle? Yet very little is questioned here.

The countless images depicting people's hardship and distress, displayed as prints on the exhibition walls and massively projected onto the external walls of the disused railway sheds in the Parc des Ateliers during what is called the 'Night of the Year' - are unsettling to me. I feel repeatedly bombard with snippets of people's lives that are divorced from reality of the situation they were made in. It feels as the most important matter here is the production and display of powerful images. But these powerful images, which many of them are without a doubt, seem presented as entertainment, designed to create an emotional response so brief and digestible that it can be quickly replaced by the next photograph in the production line of image consumption.

Not all the work at Les Rencontrs d'Arles left me feeling this way, much of the work curated by Nan Goldin, along with her own work on show, were notable exceptions; as was the insightful photographs of Eugene Richard's new colour work: The Blue Room, which thoughtfully details abandoned houses across America. Other work that stays in my mind is Paulo Nozolino's Far Cry and Michal Ackerman's Half Life, both of which were displayed as slideshows with sonic accompaniment.

Whilst I enjoyed Les Rencontres d'Arles photography festival, I did leave wondering where I fit in this world - if at all.