Echotypes – Jonathan Hounshell I’m standing in one spot in an underground transit station. As passengers scurry to and from the train, I’m repeatedly capturing still-images, shooting from the hip, handheld and at low exposure in a radius of 180 degrees. After a short while, I have a ragbag of images that are not only sequential, but they also have the potential to form an image together as a whole. The result is a multilayered panorama with an ever-changing border of jagged angles, set in motion like a shuffling deck of cards. Still-images are layered, skewed and aligned over, under, and from end to overlapping end. These multi-directional images had to be forced back into the cone of vision for a single view of the station. Much like my other work, this series of images explores the ideas of time, of motion, and human interaction. It delves into the loneliness found in a crowd of people. It seeks to understand the numen of modern conveniences in age-old places. I call these moving images, Echotypes, in the spirit of early photography such as the Daguerreotype or Calotype. And, they are echoes in that they record the reverberations of lives in motion. There are several Echotypes in this series. Every one is meant to loop continuously whether they are online or even displayed in a gallery setting through digital hardware. Much like one would silently observe and analyze a painting hanging on a wall, each Echotype can be viewed for as long as it takes to appreciate the content. |
Echotype #6
Beneath the city's high fashion shopping district, all walks of life cross paths. |
Echotype #5
The strange presence of daylight floods the bricks and mortar of Paddington Station. |
Echotype #4 In the cold fluorescent light, city dwellers blur past the sheen of metal panels and the shimmer of glossy tiles, burrowed beneath the boroughs. Comprised of 48 photographs. |
Echotype #2 This Echotype has also been set to music and was one of the official juried selections in Lumen Eclipse’s “LE60 One Minute Film Festival” held in Boston, MA in 2008. Comprised of 36 photographs. |
Echotype #1 This Echotype was built of images made at the Park Street stop on the Green Line, America’s first subway station. Underneath one of our oldest cities, this subway station still funnels a multitude of city dwellers. After 11 decades, it has undoubtedly changed in appearance, but the concept of human movement has not changed. Therefore, this image also explores the passage of time and the irony of modern life threaded through history. Real people, real lives, recorded at a few specific moments together in one specific locale, perhaps never to meet the same way again. Comprised of 28 photographs. |
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