“I do not know
What is the difference
between
Of the Sun and the Moon?”
“Stare directly at each of them for FIVE minutes. You will have an answer”
“Perhaps true, total photography […] is a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations.”
—Italo Calvino
For the last three (solar) years i’ve taken at least one photo per day, every day, in an ongoing series of small acts of deliberate persistence. After more than 1000 days patterns emerge, inspiration ebbs and returns, the pile of fragments grows. While i’ve never made a deliberate attempt to narrow the focus or or create further constraints than ‘one photo per day’ it’s inevitable that subjective and analytic patterns become visible.
The analytic patterns have been extracted using the Flickr API (the code can be found at github). During 02013 there are more greyscale images (171) than previously while light (66), pattern (41), reflection (38), texture (29), shadow (27) and plants (20) remain common themes (for previous years see 02012 (366) and 02011 (365))
.
During the year there were 746 unique tags used of which 462 were only used once, these include agave, fishbones, gargoyles in boxes, ရွှေတိဂုံစေတီတော် (aka Shwedagon Zedi Daw) and vanga. Taxidermy, Sarracenia, The Secretariat, Geomancy and Filmske Novosti were also only mentioned once.
The majority of photos were made in Belgium (241) with others in Australia (48), Croatia (18), Austria (10), Burma (9), Cambodia (7), Singapore (7), Indonesia (6), Iceland (4), UK (5), Romania (4), Germany (3), Switzerland (1), The Netherlands (1) and France (1). (local level geolocation is probably more informative but also less comprehensive)
Flickr also establishes a ranking of what it algorithmically determines “interestingness” and interestingly enough, a significant portion of those images are from 02013. Of the various groups posted to, the most common were blurism, Leica, Black and White, FlickrCentral, Abstract Photos and Urban Fragments (No People).
I’ve begun to see this daily practice as a point of departure, a habit to maintain focus (or resemble it) curiosity and ambiguity. Some of the more persistent photos from 02013 were sliced from moments of distraction, accident or circumstance during which suggestions and new directions may emerge.
In a sequence, each image absorbs metadata, footnotes, contextual bleed (images within images) it becomes dislocated with images rendered from the middle ground between mechanical/chemical and electronic/networked where each image is no more than a scratched line across spacetime. fleeting. crystalised. repeated.
“When I’m dreaming back like that I begins to see we’re only all telescopes.”
—James Joyce