Cities

This is an ongoing series based in the same, conceptual methodology as my landscape work. In photographing landscape my approach has always been consciously to try to avoid applying any pre-determined aesthetic; to allow the land – which, could it care at all, would, I am sure, care little about whether it “pictures” well – a larger voice than my own. To this end, my methodology has been to seek out and photograph selected horizons, horizons between my camera and which things sometimes intervene. In the “Cities” series, I do the same thing, however, the appearance of the resulting images is dramatically different. I position myself with a camera, either hand-held or on a tripod, at a location in a city past which, for an extended period, one can be assured of a constant, dense flow of pedestrians. Over one or two hours, 3 to 400 photographs are made from roughly the same position. No viewfinder is used. Apart from the initial establishment of point of view, the distribution of physical elements within each frame is mediated only by the moment of exposure. 192 of the photographs are subsequently selected, reproduced and presented, in temporal order, as a single, 122 cm. x 244 cm. panel – a demographic “snapshot” of the cosmopolitanism I now find common to all major cities.

PARIS