Wide Pic Panoramic Camera

Today I collected the first batch of prints made with my Wide Pic Panoramic Camera. The first and most striking thing about these images is their letterbox 'panoramic' border. The thick, black wedge divides the image (the borders are part of the image not external to it) clearly into thirds and makes horizontal lines of composition immediately more potent and arresting. The border here must be considered a part of the image as it qualifies the composition. This is more or less subtle depending on the strength and darkness of the lines in the middle section of the image.

The border invites a particular way of seeing and a uniformity within the images. Sifting through the prints it feels as though each image is part of a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces tessellate and can be arranged to create a new landscape.

Another effect of the 'Panoramic' view is its cinematic framing. To arrange them in this jigsaw manner where there is no right or wrong progression creates movement in and between images as they are placed in succession. I wish to expand upon this process later by mapping a journey through Anglia Square.

This roll of film also marks my first tentative experimentations with multiple exposures. Due to the simplicity of the equipment I have been using, coupled with the fact I am not well acquainted with it, the effects created by these multiple exposures were barely in my control; I wound the film back what I believed to be roughly a frame and took the next image.

Fellow NUCA graduate Jo Surzyn uses multiple exposures in her work to create a landscape which 'is an abstraction, suggestion, representation and even perhaps provocation... [which] represents a single location but points towards a larger context.' Where information is lost or blurred the reader is asked to make their own interpretation. It is like seeing the sketch from which a painting is made. Here the image's subjective margin is opened up and the reader is required to project their experience into this space. John Berger explains that;

Overlapping images and grouping them as above provides a wider context for the overall image and better represents the way our memories are formed and recalled. The multiple exposure images simultaneously provide a greater context while remaining vague , insofar as giving a sense of place as opposed to a definite trace. I intend to expand upon these experiments in multiple exposures and mapping/merging images in the coming weeks.

PACT Animal Sanctuary

The experience of browsing in a charity shop, of this charity shop in particular, is a curious one. It is an attic for the community where unused picture frames, video cassettes, exercise bikes, cameras and old clothes are stuffed away. The shop unit is arranged like a sitting room with sofas facing the centre, china dolls on sideboards, picture frames on the walls; it is a shop disguised as a house.

It is furnished with weightless mementoes. By this I mean there is a sense of nostalgia and time-passed but the reader is aware these items have been discarded; the nostalgic reading is undermined and there is no weight of history in the objects.
In arguing the case that photography should be considered as separate from fine-art, John Berger explains that ‘The good photograph is the well-composed one. Yet this is only true in so far as we think of photographic images imitating painted ones.’ While painting’s strength lies in the arrangement of objects within a frame, photography relies on what is excluded from the frame.



The objects in these images have been arranged to create a pleasing composition by the shop staff. This composition is perhaps more so dictated by practicality than aesthetics, but the latter is clearly also a consideration. In photographing these ready made pseudo-domestic compositions what is excluded from the image is, ironically, any genuine sense of an ephemeral history. This creates friction between the objects as they are somewhat forcefully arranged.