Tick, Tock, Click
PRC’s latest exhibition examines time
Click on the slide show above to hear Sharon Harper talk about how her photographs show the passage of time.
Sharon Harper’s photographs are criss-crossed with white lines — light showing the movement of stars, captured in long, multiple exposures layered together.
“I started thinking about the stars and how the light that hits the film is light years old,” says Harper, an assistant professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. “But in photography, the star registers as a stripe, because the Earth moves. So, you can measure time in photographic terms — a two-hour exposure is a three-inch line on the film.”
Harper isn’t alone in her efforts to capture hours on film. In Keeping Time, the Photographic Resource Center’s latest show, artists Stuart Allen, Erika Blumenfeld, Rebecca Cummins, Chris McCaw, Matthew Pillsbury, and Byron Wolfe document the passing of time through shadows, midnight television-watching, and daily photo diaries.
“As time seems to pass by faster and faster every day, these artists grant us a chance to look to the sky and slow down,” says PRC curator Leslie K. Brown, who curated the exhibition. “It aims to unite various projects that attempt to make sense of and keep time.”
Keeping Time is on display at the Photographic Resource Center, 832 Commonwealth Ave., through January 25, 2009. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays, and noon to 5 p.m. weekends. For more information, click here or call the PRC at 617-975-0600. The PRC is free for members of the BU community, $2 for non-BU students, and $3 for the public; free to all on Thursdays and the last weekend of the month.
Kimberly Cornuelle can be reached at kcornuel@bu.edu.
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