Portraits in Sequence

Sequencing still images has always mattered to me. It is about the experience of seeing photographs unfold in time, and how snapshots from a continuum of time can, simply put, become more than the sum of their parts.
Watching Before Sunrise (1995) again in a proper cinema in Vienna this summer, I was particularly drawn to its final montage of empty locations where Céline and Jesse had spent their day and night, now quiet in morning light.
So, while struggling with the sequencing of my photographs with Odile, I thought I’d try something similar and went back to London Fields. It ended up as a small photographic disaster, though: my long bus journey was interrupted midway, it took quite some time to find our otherwise unremarkable tree (which was actually funny), and just as I set up my tripod, a seemingly drunk man started shouting at me, thinking I was photographing him. I eventually got a few shots, but it simply didn’t work, and I was still left wondering how to go about sequencing the photos.
A few days later, almost at midnight, I thought I’d have another look at the photographs from the shoot. I normally select the strongest images early on, which means I tend to forget the rest. And there they were: a few more frames from a position and moment I had long seen as a single shot but had been wishing to turn into a sequence. They were composed roughly as I needed them, and together they seemed to hint at human presence in a different way.
Looking again at these photographs, I noticed I had been trying to perfect the frame even within this short sequence, for example by changing my focal length, which I could have done without. Yet the way I was moving the camera to work with the sun flare, and Odile tracing the lens as I did so, along with the effortless flow of her subtle poses, created something more alive and genuine, at least to my eye. Perhaps, as I get better at this, I should more often keep things simple and just observe — looking for those tiny moments when something of a person comes through in the physical world. After all, photography is my way of practising presence.

With Odile in London Fields.
From the series Here We Are.