Brief Biography:

Dan is an American photographer and cinematographer. He specializes in landscapes, mainly cityscapes as he grew up in Chicago and then moved the New York.  Before he’s a photographer, he’s a motion graphics and animation artist by profession. The photos of his I am going to be focusing on are time slice photographs.  “A time slice is more than a photograph. A time slice takes a series of photographs and combines them into one single image. It takes slices of the same photograph offset in time from several seconds up to a few minutes.” Dan says he takes around 30,000 photos to complete his time slice work. He takes his photo’s over time in order to capture the environment at different times.

Analysis:

This photo of Dan’s is of Los Angeles at night. The famous skyscrapers of American city life in which he grew up around are at the foreground of this photo and the bright lights reflecting off the water. The emphasis in contrast between the dark sky and the vibrant buildings exaggerate the idea that cities never sleep. It suggests that city people never get breaks, they are constantly moving, light are always on, cars beeping, people running to work, it’s constant pandemonium. There is a clear rule of thirds in this photo, in the middle is the city, the top is the sky and the bottom is the water. This mirrors the repetitiveness of city life and how its extremely structured, everyone gets up early goes to work then finishes work, commutes back home and then its repeated the next day .This symbolizes the difference between us and nature, we create the noise and pollution and the environment just has to deal with it. In comparison to the stillness of the sky and the water, even over time it remains the same, quiet and calm but the city is the opposite. It has a very cold tone, creating and eerie mood almost horror like, the water is so still and not much movement of clouds is occurring. He would have used a wide angle lens and put his camera on a tripod, which would have been kept in the exact same position in order to be able to create an accurate time slice of the city.

Why?

I chose Dan as my case study because I liked his idea of time being explored in just one place. Also I liked the modern feel to Dan’s work and how he focused on the light of the night, as I feel like day photography is more common than night photography. As it shows a journey without moving, emphasizing the fact that you don’t have to travel far to experience change. As well as I thought it suited Jersey because it is very small and you run out of place to go to, I wanted to capture the true beauty of Jersey, as I feel like our generation are very unappreciative of Jersey in winter. My aim is to capture an afternoon at the beach to go against the idea that most of my generation has that everywhere is same old, same old.