Windscreen

Windscreen “It was as if the car was a camera, and I was inside the camera looking out the window as if it were a lens.” Joel Meyerowitz Being a motorcyclist by nature, I always felt that the car, with its windows, roof and doors was a barrier to the more “real” experience of moving through time and space that I felt could only be experienced on a motorcycle; the immediacy and overwelming sense of presence. I spent many hours and rolls of film trying to capture the excitement I felt riding my motorcycle, come to life in the darkroom. Somehow, getting into the moving image changed my viewpoint, I saw that the car windscreen was like a cinema screen and the road stretching ahead, the projection. This opened up a whole different set of challenges and oportunities as an image maker, and reinforced the role of the road in my work. One of my early successes in photography was a picture shot through a bus windscreen in Egypt that won The Time Out photography award and was shown at The Photographers Gallery. My first film fiction film “road waits” was about a man haunted by a vision of the road that spoke to him, calling to him to leave his stable work and home life. “Runaway” a series of lith prints about a woman’s imagined journey was commissioned by Photomonth as part of a photo-poetry workshop in Hackney. Recently, I have increasingly utilised the light box as a way of displaying my work, it seemed particularly appropriate for work which was originally shot through glass, such as “Seen through a glass darkly” photographs from Aquaria, which was shown at The Towner Gallery in Eastbourne also with Uncertain States in London. With “Windscreen” the light box serves as a perfect medium for this work, as the back projection emulates the way light enters our eyes through the windscreen. The project as a whole combines over 60 black and white and colour images from a range of uniquely different locations, each one imbued with a strong sense of mood and place. “Now I'm looking at the world through a windshield And see everything in a little bit different light Now I'm looking at the world through a windshield Watchin' it a flyin' by me at the right Del Reeves