Traces Of The Real

This is a photography of an installation by the artist Niamh O’Doherty which was exhibited at Broadstone Studios during January of this year. It consists of seven Super 8 projectors and seven hanging screens. Each projector is projecting speeded-up footage shot on a beach in Donegal over the course of one day in October last year. As Niamh puts it, “the film documents the shifts and changes in light and tide through the course of a day”. It was a really well executed piece of work and I wanted to photograph it because there seemed to be a lot of things going on here that resonated with what I have been doing with this project – analogue processes, representations of time. Even the title, The Long Still, seemed like it could just as easily be referring to an extended time exposure photograph.

The image above is an exposure that corresponds to the length of one iteration of the piece, which was about 9 minutes. So in a sense it’s a single image that is a representation of a nine minute film, a film that is itself a representation of an entire day. The image is also a double exposure as I shot it from two different angles on to the same sheet of film. See the video below for a more conventional documentation of the installation. Thanks to Niamh for setting up this photograph. If you go here you will find some video documentation of the installation as well.