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Artist Statement
My interest in this project was sparked by cinemagraphs created by Jamie Beck, who attempted to create photographs with animated qualities. I was drawn to the unexpected motion within the frame along with their aesthetic qualities. Photography is about capturing a moment in time often conveying a representation of movement through various visual techniques. These techniques include slowing down the shutter speed to create a blur of the moving object and stimulating the viewer's imagination by having the object positioned in such a way as to appear to defy gravity. Both of these methods are incomplete attempts to capture motion. They are merely representations which our brains have been trained to understand as motion. What I have set out to do in this project is capture a single movement within a frame to better understand motion's role in photography.
A majority of cinemagraphs do not hold up as photographs because viewers tend to perceive them as short video clips. My way of avoiding this issue was to include photographic artifacts within each frame. I had these cinemagraphs repeat in an attempt to push beyond the animation and cause the viewer to focus deeper into the frame. This is similar to the way in which depth of field works in photography. When a camera uses a small depth of field, everything but the subject of the photograph is rendered out of focus. This blurry region is something that we cannot see normally because when we look at this region directly, the blur comes into focus. In my cinemagraphs, instead of a part of the photograph being out of focus, the blurry region is clear and still, while the subject is in motion.
My animated cinemagraphs explore the changing relationship between a still world and a moving subject. Our eyes are instantly drawn to motion, especially in the city. I chose New York City as the backdrop for this project because it is full of motion. I wanted to isolate those moments of clarity within the chaos that pervade city life. Each cinemagraph emphasizes a moment of stillness in an ever changing world through the association of the viewer with the movement. While most of the time we are too distracted to really perceive all that is happening around us, these cinemagraphs attempt to do just that. Since the world cannot be stopped, these frozen backgrounds stop time and allow the viewer to see interactions that may have been missed and capture what is going in a fleeting moment.