Slow Photography
Two days after the most severe UK-wide restrictions in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic were announced in March this year, I began a series of daily photographs from my window of the tree outside. I suspect that my experience, like many lucky not to have been directly affected by the disease, was an experience of absence. I was also fortunate enough to be able to work from home during the height of those restrictions, and like many in the arts, the home, contingently, was the site of any creative expression during that time. This series of photographs was inspired by the project of another artist, William Arnold Goldstrom, who invited people to contribute to a project named 'Lockdown Living Spaces', taking long exposure photographs-days or weeks long-of their own domestic interiors. I participated in this, but I also turned my camera to the world outside my window.
This series was begun in the spring, just as the weather was turning warmer, the week before the clocks went forward to British Summer Time. I saw that the leaves on a tree in the street immediately outside my house were unfurling from their buds. There was something in this small signal of change, of the seasonal cycle, impervious to events, that seemed like a fitting subject to concentrate my lens on, unable to grasp-or represent-events at large; photographing this tiny, incidental slice of the world obsessively acknowledges that difficulty. Photographing it through the window also seemed to highlight the sense of distance from the usual day-to-day experience of the city in which I live, suddenly curtailed, reduced to the very local and particular. The window has a history in photography from Niepce’s eight-hours-long exposure in the earliest surviving photograph from the 1820s and Talbot’s first successes at Lacock Abbey a decade later: it stands in for the fundamental act of photography, the act of framing, while reinforcing the separation of the viewer from the subject inherent in the promise of photography.
The photographs are paper negatives, presented as negatives. I took the images on photographic paper, usually used for printing in the darkroom, exposed with a large format camera instead of film, recording an image each day. Using paper negatives meant that rather than having to make a positive print on paper from a film negative, every photograph in the series is exactly what was exposed in the camera each day. For consistency, these were all shot with the same camera, but it does have a convertible lens, meaning I could choose between either a wider-angled shot, which would show more of the relationship of the tree with its surroundings, or a narrower angle of view, concentrating on the tree more closely. Using paper negatives, less sensitive than most camera film, resulted in longer exposures: only on the brightest, sunniest days were exposures measured in fractions of seconds; otherwise most photographs required exposures of several seconds’ duration. As negatives, the images require some deciphering, a slower looking, perhaps, than might otherwise be the case, estranging the viewer from the mundane scene recorded each day. Due to the long exposures, no figures appear in the photographs; at the start of the project, the street outside was generally empty, but later, especially when schools reopened in September, the exposures still did not record people passing outside the window.
Instead, the tree comes into full leaf, followed by blossom, and then berries, although these are hard to distinguish. Meanwhile, vehicles in the street begin to come and go with more regularity as the series continues; initially a car opposite was unmoved for many weeks, one of its tyres slowly deflating. Once in full leaf, the wind not infrequently blurs the leaves of the tree. The lengthening days as spring turned to summer allowed for a greater variety of times in which to take the photographs over the course of a day.
The series had a clear beginning: at the time it wasn’t clear when restrictions would be lifted, and so there was not clear indication as to what might constitute the moment when I should end the photographs, marking the days. I did consider doing so on the first day that there were no recorded deaths in the UK associated with Covid-19. One day was initially reported as such, but the figures were later revised, and this was not so (I had, I imagine, at the time been thinking about Broomberg and Chanarin’s abstract photographic piece about the British Army’s presence in Afganistan from 2008 titled ‘The Day Nobody Died’, an artwork about the inability to represent the intangible nature of what was known as the war on terror). I considered instead that the series could finish when the leaves fell from the tree, returning it (almost) to the state it was when the photographs began. The series of daily photographs passed the six-month mark as cases began to rise again towards the end of September. The weather changed. Some of the photographs become obscured by condensation on the window. Before the leaves could fall this autumn, the council pruned the tree. Suddenly, the whole crown of the tree - or what was left of it - could fit entire onto each sheet of photographic paper: previously the tree was much to big to be encompassed within the view of the window, let alone a single photograph. The clocks went back today. I continue to photograph the tree, as the days get shorter.
