Capturing time

Photos allow one to share a moment in time regardless of  physical locations, to share the human experience.

To share a moment in time, how long of a moment and how does this actually occur? To do this a photo always captures the temporal dimension  in the form of shutter speed, in other words how much time is the light allowed to shine on the film or these days sensor. This time is usually in short spurts from fractions of a second for most pictures to sometimes minutes for those very long exposures.

I always been fascinated about the freezing of this temporal moment on the frame, or in other words how much time you actually captured on a single frame of film or in a digital file. But how about capturing even more time on a single frame say hours or days and compressing it to comfortably fit. This is what artist and photographer Stephen Wilkes is doing with his most recent project “Day to Night”.

See him talk about it in this recent Ted Talk.