From My Window

For years I have been intrigued by the idea of extended time exposures. My premise is simple: by giving a single sheet of film extended amounts of exposure, time can be captured and compressed onto a single image or into an individual frame. This idea has fascinated me for years. By extending the exposure through minutes, hours or days, the film becomes a canvas that has a certain amount of predictability to it. However, it is also laden with surprises. These surprises work both as fascinations and frustrations for me in the visualization and technological process.

This is part of a portfolio that was made while living in Dubrovnik, Croatia for three months in the spring 2007. Dubrovnik is a beautiful old port town nestled on the Adriatic Sea. When I arrived I rented a wonderful apartment that sat on the side of a mountain overlooking the old town and the island of Lokrum. Having never lived for this amount of time by the sea I was entranced by the view and wanted to see how many different ways I could capture it. I challenged myself to limit this project to one camera and a small variety of lenses and to photograph for the entire time and not move my camera away from this wonderful view through my window. How could I capture my awe of this place and not make the usual ‘pretty’ images of the beautiful city? How could I show all the amazing varieties in the light and climatic changes I was observing? As all of these images were recorded on film I did not process until I returned home. I was working on faith that something would visually work.

I lived in Dubrovnik for about three months or just over 2100 hours. Of those hours my lens was open approximately 1900 of them with exposures ranging from quick to almost four days and nights.