No Two Dawns
Very specifically when we designed the website, we did not put any multiple image clusters in the main chapters. This was specifically done as most commercial or editorial clients rarely go beyond an occasional diptych or triptych. Photographic services are expensive to begin with, and it is a rare budget that allows for any truly complex form of comparison.
Ironically, much of my personal work makes use of comparisons whether it be changes over time, space, scale or variation within type. I really like these types of projects because my primary conceptual interest is what is invisible to all of us, even though we walk past it twice a week. For the website, some photos were rearranged into assemblages in a single image, or the most affective photo in a cluster was selected.
The two primary personal projects I have been working on over the last few years make use of this type of strategy constantly. The Rim Fire photos that are up on the site in the PROJECTS area, are the initial photos from autumn 2013 when the public was first let back into the area. Every three months, for the last three years, I have been going back into the area to record the biological recovery, and human activities in the area. It is only by returning to the same areas and taking the same photo over time that we can see the subtle recovery of the scarred landscape. The second group, is a series of spatial transects taken in every major desert of North America, actually subdividing the landscape into a series of intimate landscapes that allow us to begin to unravel these visually chaotic environments, and make sense of them.
Above we have the one image in the chapter sections of my site that makes use of these typological structures. The Cans at Dawn are actually part of a larger group of images where for fifteen mornings in a row, fifteen minutes prior to sunrise, the exact same photo was taken. There are in fact, fifteen individual photos with the exact same composition. For the photo above, we selected at random four of the cans, and reassembled them in a matrix in one photo using Photoshop. In these photos, the cans were used because they reflected the dawn sky so accurately. My goal was to learn how the light and tones of dawn vary as most autumn mornings in northern CA are cloudless and to the naked eye look close to the same.
Clearly as the photos show, though cloudless most mornings, no two dawns are the same. This variation only becomes apparent when simultaneous viewing occurs. These types of comparisons begin to give us a bit of a sense of how the world around us works and is organized.
