SELENO- deals with the sense of time in cities. The photographs in this series capture the passage of the moon through the night sky above Manhattan. Throughout history, the moon has risen and set repeatedly over the flat horizon of the island, and now it sets in the artificial skyline created by the city’s skyscrapers. It is within the boundaries of this artificial skyline that time is measured by speed of commercial and residential development, the movement of tourists, the speed of business and the ‘New York Minute’ existing as a state of flux where most people stay only temporarily. The act of photographing the moon and tides for long hours, however, reorients time around lunar cycles far removed from the sense of time in City life. These photographs illuminate the odd and distorted relationship between standardized clock time, as a concept invented by humans that now defines not only our individual life plans, but also the entire pulse of society and more natural experiences of universal and spatial time.
Through natural and man-made elements in our daily lives, time is experienced multidimensionally, be it the rapid development of the waterfront zones, the speed of a workday or the ebb and flow of the Hudson River tides. My examination of time is expressed poetically through the photographic capturing of these elements.
In this ongoing photographic project, I capture the trajectory of the moon over a period of five to six hours. The numeric titles refer to the date and time that the photograph was taken, rendering a more “objective” portrayal of time’s passage. The essential theme of this body of work, however, is not the moon or the Manhattan cityscape in and of itself, but rather how I approach the universally experienced, but subjectively perceived element how spatial time exists within the universal.
The choice to photograph the iconic Manhattan waterfront may come off as cliché, but it is important because the waterfront references the physical borders that define the island, allowing for a visual effect as if one had an objective view. Photographing iconic spots also invites the viewer to sense the difference between my experience of time and theirs which gives this body of work a documentative spirit. Revisiting the same location over the course of several years also showcases how the linear passage of time changes observable phenomena like gravity’s effect on the ever-changing tides, the expansion and contraction of the city’s skyline and the trajectory of the lunar cycle dominating both the natural and man-made elements which are beholden to this very illuminative cycle.
