Post by Leila Mansouri
A photograph is a recording of light waves at a particular place and in a particular time. You can shorten or lengthen the exposure. You can manipulate the image after the fact. But a photograph is anchored to the space and time of its creation. Here is what the Naica Mine in Chihuahua, Mexico looks like in the present day one beckons. Look back in time at Queens, New York in the 1920s another asks.
Sometimes, though, a photograph manages to bend the time or space it captures. That’s the unsettling trick Michael Reese’s and Chino Otsuka’s photographs pull off.
In “Inches Above the Earth,” Reese takes the world around your ankles and transforms it into a vast airspace. Fighter jets zoom out of whorls of fencing. Hot air balloons drift out of rusted cans and across parking lot lakes. None of the photos are digitally manipulated. Instead, they use angles, light, and tiny, meticulously painted model aircraft to get you to reimagine the universe just above the ground. Check out the entire collection of photographs on Reese’s website. (Via Slate.)
Otsuka’s “Imagine Finding Me” series does rely on photoshop, but looking at the haunting photographs of her adult self next to her younger self, you’d never guess it. Her work layering together her “double self-portraits” is meticulous and loving. To create each, she carefully blended a snapshot of herself now into a photo was taken more than twenty years before.
A photograph is a recording of light waves at a particular place and in a particular time. You can shorten or lengthen the exposure. You can manipulate the image after the fact. But a photograph is anchored to the space and time of its creation. Here is what the Naica Mine in Chihuahua, Mexico looks like in the present day one beckons. Look back in time at Queens, New York in the 1920s another asks.
Sometimes, though, a photograph manages to bend the time or space it captures. That’s the unsettling trick Michael Reese’s and Chino Otsuka’s photographs pull off.
In “Inches Above the Earth,” Reese takes the world around your ankles and transforms it into a vast airspace. Fighter jets zoom out of whorls of fencing. Hot air balloons drift out of rusted cans and across parking lot lakes. None of the photos are digitally manipulated. Instead, they use angles, light, and tiny, meticulously painted model aircraft to get you to reimagine the universe just above the ground. Check out the entire collection of photographs on Reese’s website. (Via Slate.)
Otsuka’s “Imagine Finding Me” series does rely on photoshop, but looking at the haunting photographs of her adult self next to her younger self, you’d never guess it. Her work layering together her “double self-portraits” is meticulous and loving. To create each, she carefully blended a snapshot of herself now into a photo was taken more than twenty years before.
The effect is one of time travel. She goes back in time to shadow, joke with, snack with, and in one case even seems to reassure her former self. Otsuka’s more recent “Memoriography” extends her work with time and remembrance – this time to the archives of the British Museum, into which she projects images and recordings of her own memories. (Via My Modern Met.)
Of course, Otsuka and Reese aren’t doing anything fundamentally different than photographers have always done. Even the earliest photographs captured the light of particular times and places in ways that made us think we saw things that we in fact didn’t. But Otsuka and Reese untether photography from the sort of time and space we’re used to in ways that ripple out from their images. Their unstuck photography is our unstuck universe.
Of course, Otsuka and Reese aren’t doing anything fundamentally different than photographers have always done. Even the earliest photographs captured the light of particular times and places in ways that made us think we saw things that we in fact didn’t. But Otsuka and Reese untether photography from the sort of time and space we’re used to in ways that ripple out from their images. Their unstuck photography is our unstuck universe.
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