Using my iPhone as a slit-scan camera, the Amtrak Regional train between NYC Penn Station and Rhinecliff becomes a moving platform from which to ‘paint’ panoramas of the passing land/cityscape.The TrainPans project examines travel from unappreciated perspectives – peering into back alleys, cutting through city, industry and neighborhood. Time is a central actor – the time it takes to expose an image and the times exposed in it. Layers of human construction covering miles and decades flash by in seconds, and are compiled line-by-line becoming an image composite of time and place.
There is renewal too – the constant rebuilding and renovation radiating out from the rail line, the great artery of human industry. Likewise, there is renewal in the mechanics of imaging – where a panoramic algorithm mates a camera’s curtain shutter with an office document scanner and a supercomputer, producing new tools to probe the world as we pass through it.
The photos in this portfolio are ‘conventional’ images, distressed compressions of between a few seconds to a minute’s time flashing by outside my mobile frame of reference – the train. By using a moving point-of-view, I’ve commandeered the panoramic stitching algorithm to record a sweep of time through space, rather than a static scene in a particular place and moment. The photos are directly recorded with the camera’s panorama stitching algorithm and the content not otherwise manipulated. I’ve captured multiple threads of these photos from the same trip repeatedly over the years and I am also working on projects to mine this database of material for relationships between the images.
A complete selection of images in this series can be seen on my LGD.photography website at TrainPans: North-East.