Jacqueline Butler

Whitethorns at night

Although all its elements are always present at once, the image unlocks its multifarious secrets only over time, in the course of viewing. It is scarcely possible to define the speed, or rather the slowness, at which such observation of an image takes place, except to say that it can never be as short as an instant: there is simply too much to see. Since one aspect of looking is that things can be ‘overlooked’, viewing an image will never come to an end in the sense that everything has been seen that there is to see.

“Why has pleasure in slowness disappeared?” Helmut Friedel, from the book Moments in Time, On Narration and Slowness

In my photography I record my own personal domestic environment using medium and large format cameras working at night with long exposure times.

Contact:
j.a.butler@mmu.ac.uk