An extract from Gane's artist's statement from his '200 Seconds' project.
"The
photographic image is both implicated in, and antithetic to, memory,
for unlike the mental image of a past event, it is able to imprint
itself on our memories repeatedly without relinquishing any of its
vividness. Family photographs and films are revisited in order to
re-live an event, but with each viewing, it is the recorded images
themselves that become further implanted in memory.
In
this work, a leather case in which family cine films have been stored
for over twenty years is converted into a camera"
"In stark contrast to the present
digital proliferation of personal photographs and their distribution
through social networking sites. Traditional black and white paper
negatives are digitally scanned then printed to the same scale and
dimensions as the projection screen on which the films were repeatedly
viewed on family occasions.
These
mise-en-abîme images are part of an extended photographic and
theoretical investigation, exposing and exploring a space between the
Bergsonian notions of perception and recollection. It
is intended (with reference to the still photograph’s accepted
associations with death) that through an amalgamation of cinematic and
photographic time, new life may be given to the resulting images."
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| "amsterdam- 1973" ©Hamish Gane |
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| "snape, august 1983" ©Hamish Gane |
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| "yorkshire, easter 1976" ©Hamish Gane |
What speaks to me in this project is that fact that these images have absolutely no emotional context for me, but yet are clearly so personal to the artist. We are looking at a glimpse into his family's past, and although I don't know anything about them, looking through all the images I can already relate to some of the situations. The fact that family holidays are always documented, and that there always has to be one 'nice family photo' to take home. Gane's delving into his own memory allows the viewer to delve into their own. His use of a pinhole camera and Super 8 film also conjures a feeling for me of everything being homemade, which it seems to me is very important in this project. Would it have the same effect if he shot the images on a hi-tech digital camera, or had the movies transferred to DVD? In my opinion, no. At the risk of repeating myself, it is all home-made, even down to using the case which the films were stored in as the pinhole camera. Every single aspect of this project is born of his family and their memories.What is highlighted in this project is that every family is unique - whether they are close, distant, large or small. If every single person in the world did this same projects that results would be so varied, and that is the charm and appeal of the images for me.
http://www.hamishgane.com/
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