Andrei Tarkovsky called his movie making process “Sculpting in Time”. While he was talking exclusively about cinema, I was trying to adapt this idea to other forms of art. Would it be possible to bend time using photography? Is it possible to create a not moving, 2D, completely still medium that makes people feel, and ultimately “see” time?
That’s how the photo project “Timeless” was born, using ultra long exposure times and combining them with another love of mine: architecture. If you’ve seen night photographs of a highway filled with cars, you already seen ultra long exposure pictures that was taken at night, but I applied the same technique during the day to the sky as our natural highway, and clouds became the trails of brake lights of cars and trucks. All the images you see are single exposure images, that’s why it was so time consuming to wait for the perfect balance of clouds moving with the right pace and sunlight coming from the right angle.
The city where I started this journey is Singapore, which was a perfect place to experiment with different techniques and settings, and this city state is filled with amazing architecture. After the first few weeks I got to know what kind of weather I’m looking for, where should the sun be, how strong the wind should be and you can see the results. Singapore is full with vibrant colors, but I've chosen to shoot black and white, as it brings out the contrast between the sharp buildings and the smooth clouds.
In the span of around four months I spent 107 days, 615kms of walking, 1734kms of commuting to finish the first city of this series. I’ll publish a few other galleries from Singapore, and hopefully - if time and budget allows it - next year I can continue the project in other cities. From a technical point my dream would be to step up to large format, either digital or 8x10 black and white film.
Thank you for checking the images.
Laszlo Laco Gaal
“Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art”
Andrei Tarkovsky
