Happy New Year 2021

My project 24 7 732 represents a kind of portrait of 2020 through 366 images made in the city of lights, Paris. The city's timeless qualities are on display, so much harmony and correspondence with all the senses in almost any locality. The coffee shops, bars, streets, and trees could be anywhere; but the artworks, monuments, and museums are recognisably Paris. The imagery is complex, much like the year that was in it. Each of the 366 vertical panoramas were composed to be flipped upside down; it goes both ways; so this duality multiplies the pieces by 2, equalling 732 images. This format echoes the year in it: up was down, wrong was right; the unexpected became normalised, well became ill. Each image in the series is shown only once, along with the full, ambitious body of work. The two images below are the same, shown both ways as per my design.

3 Jan Website_71

I constructed each image of the 366, loaded up to be analysed for the sensory elements familiar to lovers of Paris. The featured image here was made in a Marais cafe/bar. Maybe you can smell coffee, or the toilet in the small space. Touch the grit of the stone wall. Hear the ringtone from the phone at the table across. When I composed a visual for the scene, I considered the convex, golden sun mirror on the wall offset by the concave, golden lamp that looks more like a fruit bowl when up-side down. A diagonal, wooden beam bisects the one image into two. The window light frames my auto-portrait in the sun mirror, and the other side shows the light source for the room. My gesture of motion with camera records time passing and jagged changes to the elements as the camera changes position. For this picture, I was backing down a small set of stairs as the exposure occurred.