Artist Bio: Over the past 20 years, Ansen Seale has developed a technique called slit scan photography. More than just a visual curiosity, it has become a useful tool for the exploration of themes meaningful to him, like ideas about time and our place in its continuum.
It is important to understand that these images are not artificially manipulated. This is truly the way the slit scan camera sees the world.
Rather than suspending a single moment, this technique examines the passage of time. In his own version of a panoramic camera, a single sliver of space is imaged over an extended period of time, yielding the surprising result that unmoving objects are blurred and moving bodies are rendered clearly. This is no Photoshop trick. By re-imagining what a camera is and how it should work, abstraction becomes the norm, not the exception.
Instead of mirroring the world as we know it, this camera can records a hidden reality. Like a microscope or telescope, this machine expands our ability to perceive more about the nature of reality.
Sometimes, by the elimination of information, we gain a more complete understanding of the visual reality around us.
The Transient Landscape is a series of photographs exploring landscapes and cityscapes. The slit scan technique produces many strange time-based effects, including the absence of perspective and the extreme compression or expansion of objects based on their spatial relationship to the camera and how they (or the camera) are moving.
Moving by train, boat, car, airplane, cable car or foot, various forms of locomotion transport the artist and his camera to scan the landscapes. The result is a view of reality which is pure photography–unmanipulated, but with an inescapable visual twist based on a changed set of rules.
instagram: @ansenseale
Creating places that can’t be built by anyone else
…for anyone else.