Blue Loop, July unfolds in a single, continuous take, which was shot from July 4th–5th in 2014. With the shutter left open for seconds at a time the entire night is printed on film.(1) Yet no clarity emerges for all of the information it contains. The temporal scale is muddied. The lack of geographical or architectural landmarks makes it difficult to find one’s bearings, exacerbated by the puzzling light mirrored at the top and bottom of the frame, a combinatory effect of long exposure, a streetlamp just out of frame, and shooting on film.
(1) I mean this in distinction from another form of time-lapse photography that takes a regularly exposed frame every so many seconds or minutes, leaving long moments where no image is captured.
I’ve always been interested in ways in which images contain time. Like Michael Wesely’s (hyper-)long-exposure photographs of offices, construction sites, and students’ faces that seem somehow to age in their stillness. Or Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of darkened movie houses, illuminated by the unfurling film whose entire running time is absorbed by the screen and hidden in a pool of blinding light.
The time I wanted to contain in my own images was the duration of the firework itself, the amount of time it took for the projectile to climb, explode, and fade. Long-exposure here was meant as an engagement with the spectacle of the Independence Day fireworks, often understood as nationalistic celebrations of militaristic might and American empire. Even concretized signs such as these have a ‘temporal contour’, an objectifiable time-shape of a stimulus . . . [that] impinges on the central nervous system from without or within.(2) A smile, for example, may have a stable position in a system of meaning, but the speed or slowness of the same smile can have very dissimilar affects.(3)
(2) An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain, Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphie, 2010
(3) The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, Daniel Stern, 2004
With the full life of a firework condensed to a few frames, the intonation (the affect) transforms. A subtle politic, perhaps: explosions neutered of bombast, a gesture underlined by the displacement of sound. Such stillness then revived to motion appeared to me less as a document of a night of fireworks than an animation of light’s traces on the background sky as screen, which engages another layer of spectacle: the role of the cinematic image in the production of awe, long utilized for political or ideological ends.
A more overt political gesture might be to enact this process on a city’s or nation’s sanctioned fireworks display. I’m thinking perhaps most recently of the one displayed over the White House as the finale of the Republican National Convention. At the time I was excited by the thought of turning the camera decidedly away from Chicago’s fireworks, set off at Navy Pier. My camera instead was pointed due west toward Pilsen, where I then lived.
Local fireworks themselves, like those in Pilsen, often refuse to be semantically closed like a city’s event. They are myriad, spread throughout the city with no single governing ideological element. They are organized and ignited by diverse populations. Celebrations certainly, some perhaps with a nationalistic fervor. Softly sanctioned, technically illegal, yet brazen, cheerful, and enormous, they can carry other connotations as well.
From the second-floor window of my apartment, I’m safe to read overtones of protest into the light display of a community I don’t really know. Protest toward encroaching gentrification (of which I was a part), of funding diverted to other city districts, of waning representation, or more slowly plowed winter streets. Though perhaps this is another slippery aspect of the semantics, specifically who is doing the interpreting (a cop, a gang member, or a petty booj like you and I reading some inspirational democratic politics into the displays).(4)
(4) A white, middle class ten-year-Pilsen-residing friend in an email response to an initial draft.
My friend reminds me I’m in danger of closing things down again, of trying to get the image to say something instead of allowing it to be what it is: an affective assertion of presence. The July 4th firework, opened by temporality or context can shift more clearly into this register of gesture; its symbolic clarity dampened but its dynamis intact.(5) Perhaps this is the fate and paradox of every image, since every image contains some flux, however small, of time and context.
(5) Notes on Gesture, Giorgio Agamben, 1992
Blue Loop, July unfolds in a single, continuous take, which was shot from July 4th–5th in 2014. With the shutter left open for seconds at a time the entire night is printed on film.(1) Yet no clarity emerges for all of the information it contains. The temporal scale is muddied. The lack of geographical or architectural landmarks makes it difficult to find one’s bearings, exacerbated by the puzzling light mirrored at the top and bottom of the frame, a combinatory effect of long exposure, a streetlamp just out of frame, and shooting on film.
I’ve always been interested in ways in which images contain time. Like Michael Wesely’s (hyper-)long-exposure photographs of offices, construction sites, and students’ faces that seem somehow to age in their stillness. Or Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of darkened movie houses, illuminated by the unfurling film whose entire running time is absorbed by the screen and hidden in a pool of blinding light.
The time I wanted to contain in my own images was the duration of the firework itself, the amount of time it took for the projectile to climb, explode, and fade. Long-exposure here was meant as an engagement with the spectacle of the Independence Day fireworks, often understood as nationalistic celebrations of militaristic might and American empire. Even concretized signs such as these have a ‘temporal contour’, an objectifiable time-shape of a stimulus . . . [that] impinges on the central nervous system from without or within.(2) A smile, for example, may have a stable position in a system of meaning, but the speed or slowness of the same smile can have very dissimilar affects.(3)
With the full life of a firework condensed to a few frames, the intonation (the affect) transforms. A subtle politic, perhaps: explosions neutered of bombast, a gesture underlined by the displacement of sound. Such stillness then revived to motion appeared to me less as a document of a night of fireworks than an animation of light’s traces on the background sky as screen, which engages another layer of spectacle: the role of the cinematic image in the production of awe, long utilized for political or ideological ends.
A more overt political gesture might be to enact this process on a city’s or nation’s sanctioned fireworks display. I’m thinking perhaps most recently of the one displayed over the White House as the finale of the Republican National Convention. At the time I was excited by the thought of turning the camera decidedly away from Chicago’s fireworks, set off at Navy Pier. My camera instead was pointed due west toward Pilsen, where I then lived.
Local fireworks themselves, like those in Pilsen, often refuse to be semantically closed like a city’s event. They are myriad, spread throughout the city with no single governing ideological element. They are organized and ignited by diverse populations. Celebrations certainly, some perhaps with a nationalistic fervor. Softly sanctioned, technically illegal, yet brazen, cheerful, and enormous, they can carry other connotations as well.
From the second-floor window of my apartment, I’m safe to read overtones of protest into the light display of a community I don’t really know. Protest toward encroaching gentrification (of which I was a part), of funding diverted to other city districts, of waning representation, or more slowly plowed winter streets. Though perhaps this is another slippery aspect of the semantics, specifically who is doing the interpreting (a cop, a gang member, or a petty booj like you and I reading some inspirational democratic politics into the displays).(4)
My friend reminds me I’m in danger of closing things down again, of trying to get the image to say something instead of allowing it to be what it is: an affective assertion of presence. The July 4th firework, opened by temporality or context can shift more clearly into this register of gesture; its symbolic clarity dampened but its dynamis intact.(5) Perhaps this is the fate and paradox of every image, since every image contains some flux, however small, of time and context.
Notes
(1) I mean this in distinction from another form of time-lapse photography that takes a regularly exposed frame every so many seconds or minutes, leaving long moments where no image is captured.
(2) An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain, Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphie, 2010
(3) The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, Daniel Stern, 2004
(4) A white, middle class ten-year-Pilsen-residing friend in an email response to an initial draft.
(5) Notes on Gesture, Giorgio Agamben, 1992