Output details

The Atlas Project. A series of digital prints of photographic recordings of central public places worldwide with legends that include the title, a short description of the events during the recording and all relevant technical data.

‘The Atlas Project’ is a longitudinal research project comprising recordings of public spaces in cities worldwide using an innovative photographic process developed for the project. The overarching research question is: how can still photography depict and decode the nature and use of contemporary urban spaces? The research aimed to reveal new insights into photographic processes and to offer a different conceptualisation of the temporal within photography, particularly with regard to the spatial.

The development and implementation of a new digital photography method distinguishes this project within its field. A special high-resolution camera records a horizontal slice of space (one pixel high) at regular intervals over a predefined period of time. Each of these ‘slices’ is then sequentially layered to form the image, the vertical axis representing time, the horizontal axis representing space. The scale and final dimensions of each image are defined by the number of slices recorded and the horizontal angle of view captured. The images render space as both static and mutable: unlike cartographical maps, composed of geographical and architectural markings, these images interpret places through human activity and temporal change. This interrogation of the temporal/spatial relationship of urban space is distinctive in terms of process and resultant image.

Since 2009, public spaces in twenty-five international cities as far afield as Washington, Rome, Warsaw, Tokyo and Sydney have been captured. For exhibition, Atlas is presented as a series of individual archival quality inkjet prints. The project will be shown in a touring exhibition in 2013 – 2015, funded by an Arts Council England grant (£15,000), launching with a solo show at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland (UK) in November 2013. Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (Germany) has confirmed a solo show in July 2014. Atlas is discussed in ’Continuum’, a monograph on Weileder published internationally by Kerber Verlag (Bielefeld/Berlin).