As the title suggests, this one day landscape series consists of single-frame, fixed-location images shot over the course of a day. Using very long exposures on silver halide film, I have tried to get as much of “one day”― hopefully twenty-four hours or at least sunrise to sunset ― in a variety of places as circumstances (mostly difficult) physically permit.1
Globalization has broken down barriers and made it easier for people, information and materials to move about, yet obstructs picturing “how time passes” for others elsewhere, in unknown locales. The act of building up images of various diverse “places in time” thus becomes a small act of resistance to global trends, which creates such asymmetric disparities and “negates” the very existence of people who should be very real. I believe my using the time-and-light media of photography serves instead to “affirm” the existence of the world.
Not long ago, the painter Monet pitted himself against the continuum of the hours before Rouen Cathedral, and I find myself continuing his hopeless losing battle at different places, “one day” at a time.
Right now, at this very moment, everything advances everywhere in the world. All too obvious, yet virtually impossible to envision – and that really bothers me. I want to picture passing time congruent with the immediate terrain, to examine my own irritation through creating these works. And if possible, as with my our face series, to use them as a step toward imagining a more symmetrical world.
Ken Kitano 2010
1 Using 4 × 5 negative color film. Although developing photographs is said to take only a fraction of a second, I am attempting to accumulate such fractions.
Since the cumulative light of a single day will vary according to the weather and no one can predict light conditions, I set the exposure by sixth sense.
Sometimes I overexpose, sometimes I underexpose. For these ultra-long exposures, I have to consider where to set up my tripod to minimize building vibrations and traffic.
Viewing a landscape over time makes every place feel like an ancient reliquary of dead objects.