German photographer Michael Wesely has spent decades working on techniques for extremely long camera exposures — usually between two to three years. In the mid-1990s, he began using the technique to document urban development over time, capturing years of building projects in single frames. In 1997, he focused his cameras on the rebuilding of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and in 2001 he began photographing the Museum of Modern Art’s ambitious renovation project. He uses filters and extremely small apertures to reduce the amount of light striking the film, creating unique images that capture both space and time. Read more…
Photographer Noel Myles has been working for the past 15 years on “still films” of trees across the countryside of eastern England. He originally created platinum/palladium prints of the trees around the year 2000, and then photographed the trees a decade later using color film. He then combined pieces from the different photos into single mosaics, which he tells us are “the antithesis of the notion of a decisive moment”. Read more…
For his project titled Time, photographer John Clang shoots various locations multiple times from the same perspective, and then rips and weaves the photographs together to show multiple points in time in each image.
A series that involves recording a location, to show the passing of time in a montage style. There is a sense of intimate intricacy of how time moves, and how people, albeit in a different time, are actually closer to one another and traveling in the same shared space. I’ve always been intrigued by the constant subtle changes in my urban environment.
AgeMaps is a project by photographer Bobby Neel Adams in which he does “photo surgery” on portraits to show two different moments in a person’s life in the same image. For each subject, Adams takes a childhood photo and a current photo, prints them at the same proportions, tears them in half, and glues the halves together. He says that this is to “telescope the slow process of aging into a single picture,” and that “a jump of time is established at the tear.” Read more…
Last week we featured an amazing video by a girl named Madeline who documented 2011 by recording 1 second of footage from each day. The video above by Sam Morrison is similar: Morrison’s father bet him $100 that he couldn’t do a backflip every day of 2011, so he made it his New Year’s resolution to do so. After successfully completing the project, Morrison created the video above showing his favorite flips. The 365 individual videos can be viewed on this Tumblr page dedicated to the project. How’s that for a Project 365?
Red Peak Branding conducted an experiment last year in which they chained a fully loaded bicycle (bells, basket, lights, and the whole shebang) to a post on a busy New York City sidewalk. They then visited and photographed the bicycle every single day, resulting in the 365-photo time-lapse video seen above. What’s interesting is that the bicycle remains untouched for roughly 230 days, but once small parts start getting stolen the rest of the bicycle soon follows. This might have something to do with what’s called the “broken windows theory“.
A young woman living in Los Angeles named Madeline did a 365 day project that’s a bit different than most: instead of taking a picture a day, she decided to document each day with roughly one second of footage. At the conclusion of 2011, she combined all 365 video clips into this beautiful 7-minute-long video that offers a glimpse into what her year was like.
Toronto-based photographer Jeff Harris started a photo-a-day project back in 1999 in an effort to document his life through self-portraits. Since then, he has captured 4,748 beautiful photographs that show everything from reckless stunts to a fierce battle with cancer (warning: there’s a graphic image). Harris states,
I didn’t want 365 images of me sitting on the couch each day. There could have been that tendency, especially during the cold dark winter months to stay inside all the time, but this project inspired me to get out there and seek out interesting things.
[...] I see no reason to not make a self-portrait each day. I’m always around and always free. It’s kind of like going to the gym—it flexes your muscles and keeps you in shape. [#]
Harris is entering the 14th year of his project this year, and although his body is far from being the same as when he started this endeavor, his great photographic vision is still evident in each of his images.
For 25 years, YouTube user spoonito‘s father would record footage of spoonito and his sister walking down the stairs on Christmas morning. The video above is a compilation of the videos that shows the passing of 25 years, and the coming and going of relatives and pets.
Ken Murphy has completed his ambitious “A History of the Sky” project, which we first got a glimpse of in March of last year. Wanting to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year, Murphy installed a still camera on the roof of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, pointed at the sky and snapping a photo every 10 seconds around the clock.
After a year had passed, Murphy made this time-lapse mosaic, with each box — arranged chronologically — showing the time-lapse of a single day. They’re all synchronized by time-of-day, and provide an interesting way of looking how sunrises, sunsets, and weather change over the course of a year.
