Disturbances On A Grid
We have just finished working on Nicky Hamlyn first artist book project.
The book comprises a set of photographs and an essay about them. The photographs were taken in early September 2012, in Digital Media City, a wholly new district about twenty kilometers northwest of Seoul city centre.
The exposures were made at various times of day and night, always from the same vantage point, but not precisely so: the time and point of view varies haphazardly, because they were taken with no particular purpose in mind.
The essay is set in Letterpress on a single side of paper that wraps around the photos, which are in the form of a set of digital prints. I like the contrast between analogue and digital production processes. In the same way that silver gelatin photographs seem to become increasingly particular in their character and texture as the years go by, so letterpress type appears increasingly distinct from its digital counterpart.
Most of my work is as a filmmaker, so a photo book is a departure for me, but insofar as the work is in the form a suite of similar images, it resembles a sequence of frame enlargements from a film. There are several close-ups and fragmented views in among the wide shots that constitute the booklet’s structure. Thus a series of static images borrows from film grammar, and most films, after all, are composed of sequences of adjacent photographs, each slightly different from its neighbour. But while a photograph embodies a moment of time, a film is a concatenation of such moments, structured to a time-base of twenty four 1/50th of a second moments for every second of screen time.
I have tried in the essay to effect a translation from images into words, with the full knowledge that this is not possible, a truth that the essay acknowledges in its final paragraph.
Disturbances On A Grid
14 x 20cm, 16 pages, Soft Cover hands titched, digital print for the photographs and letterpress for the text.
Edition: 100 ISBN: 9780957079755