This work came together very quickly – over the course of one week. I did not set out to produce an exhibition, but I became very excited by some of the images I was making, and in the evenings I would review them and think about refinements to my technique, and then go out and make some more the next day. The process continued throughout my stay, and by the time I left Paris I felt I had something that would sustain an exhibition.
The title Five Seconds in Paris comes from the combined exposure time of the images on display. The images are deliberately blurred by leaving the shutter open for a long time; usually from1/5 to about 1 second. If you add the times for the ten images here it’s pretty close to five seconds.
I used a digital camera to make the work, but it has not been manipulated in any way. What you see comes straight out of the camera untouched; there’s no Photoshop, they’re not even cropped. It was important to me to just record and respond to what was in front of me, not to try make something out of it afterwards. Paris is the home of street photography, and I’m a great admirer the Paris photographers from Atget through Kertez to Cartier-Bresson. My blurry, inky black or blown out images are a long way from that type of work, but at the end of the day it’s still just a guy walking around Paris with a camera.
There are twenty images in all – a selection appears below. If you like them and want to see more, they’re in the archive.
