Michael Spano: City Rhythms
Michael Spano: City Rhythms
The Widelux is a true 35-mm. hand-held panoramic camera because the film is exposed on a curved plane as the lens spans 140 degrees.
My Widelux photographs are urban panoramas. Urban photography entails the ability to participate in the natural rhythms of city life, a domain that is simultaneously public and private. In order to arrange a cultural phenomenon into a picture, I enter small groups of people and establish an intimacy with them, giving me time and space to orchestrate the formal requirements of such a wide-angle picture.
The Graph-Check sequence camera is a 4 x 5-inch box with eight lenses, all shutters fixed at one-thousandth of a second, all apertures set at f/16. The time lapse for all lenses to complete the sequence ranges from a minimum of eight thousandths of a second to a maximum of twenty seconds.
My sequence work is in the twentyfour-second range: every three seconds from the moment I press the shutter release another lens takes another picture until all eight lenses expose a different section of film.
My Widelux and sequence work both deal with what I call the “durational” mode of photography: the photograph represents a time interval longer than one instantaneous moment.
