Playing with time - a photo on Flickriver

Playing with time
            I am amazed, stunned and delighted to say that following my submission of this book in the Royal Photographic Society's Photobook category, a book which I made for family and friends, I have been awarded  a Fellowship. 

When you make a submission to the RPS for a distinction you need to supply a Statement of Intent this was mine:

The subject of this book is time, the time we have, geological time and how as photographers we play with time. It is a collection of photographs made during my recovery following an illness. The images were made in the Yorkshire Dales.

As I came to appreciate the time it took to make each photograph I began to consider time. As my life is now measured in 6 monthly scans, time was already a huge issue.
The making of each photograph from the initial noticing to the final scan brought home time’s importance. Waiting for each exposure was a moment to consider the 300 million plus years old landscape.

The words of Paul Bowles, Susan Sontag and Shakespeare speak to me of time and our place in it. This book seeks to convey thoughts around time in a format which requires that we slow down and take time.

Text from the book:

On Friday 2 June 2021, I was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. On Monday 20 June 2022, I was told there was “no sign of cancer.” 

Following my treatment, my partner and I walked most weeks in the Yorkshire Dales. I took along a pinhole camera. I felt a need to create photographs. My wooden pinhole camera and lightest of tripods.

These walks were a journey of recovery and creation. They have also been a time to think, reflect, observe inwardly and outwardly, to notice, absorb, be enfolded and meld with the landscape.  

Time is never-ceasing, with no beginning or end, ever-changing. We are swept along in the flow of it. Walking takes time, but also gifts time. 

Using a pinhole camera was a deliberate, though futile, attempt to halt time. 

The acts of making images of the limestone and grit landscape of the Yorkshire Dales were small pauses, both slowing and recording the movement of time as the skies of the Dales floated or scudded overhead. Each stop to create an image was as a small shrine, a witnessing point in time and place to the eons embedded in the Dales.

Many of our walks in the Dales traversed a landscape of Carboniferous Limestone - rocks between 360 and 300 million years old, made of long-dead life which once lived in a warm sea south of the equator. 

The photographs in this book consist of insignificant seconds of time, of human time, taken on walks of a few brief hours. They are also of geological time, of a landscape over 300 million years old.

Thoughts of time formed as I contemplated my original prognosis of between 1 and 3 years, and my new life now measured by 6-monthly scans. We walked on ephemeral trods. Short journeys, perhaps. But all journeys change us, whether they be physical or emotional. And time goes on, both on scales we can grasp and those it is almost impossible to comprehend.

Ten minutes and five seconds. That is the total time take to expose these photographs.

A tiny, unremarkable fraction of time in the life of a person and an infinitesimally minute unit of time in the duration of this landscape and “time’s relentless melt”.

Yet each walk, every image – a “sliced out moment: - is a timeless memory.
Taken on: April 21, 2024
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