Alphaville
Paris, 2011
Handcoated emulsion on paper
How do we image not stillness, but movement itself? And in doing so, how do we break free from the restraints of representation? walkies (2007-2017) is an effort to move away from the primacy of the eye as organ of creation, especially in painting and photography, and instead to make use of the whole body. It is also an experiment in thinking time not as a succession of moments as in cinema or stilled instants as in traditional photography, but as coexistence in depth, a sedimentary time made up of all the strata stacked on a single surface.
The sixty-eight images in this series were made by walking with a large-format camera whose shutter was continuously open.* The images were not framed visually. I call these works “walkies” or “hodographs” (from the Greek hodos, meaning path). These exposure-walks ranged from several hours to one week. They bear the tremors of the body and its movement across space; each is sedimented by time. Chance played a key role in these exposures: some of the walks were cut short by unexpected detours or accidents, leading to near-dark images; others were lengthened beyond the initial plan.
Every walkie was made on the location—real or fictional—of a literary, cinematic, or painterly work from the history of art and bears its title. walkies is in this sense also an exploration of the spacetime of art.
*With two exceptions: A Week on the Merrimack and Connecticut River (2007), a week-long exposure by canoe on the eponymous rivers; and, Ohio Impromptu (2016), an hour-long exposure by bicycle in Columbus, Ohio in homage to Samuel Beckett.