M. Zassenhaus

Ten Hours

For the most part, we experience our lives at about 30 frames per second - in photography terms, this is about 1/30th of a second (or faster) as a shutter speed. As part of my ongoing preoccupation with time and a sense of place, I started to wonder how much time I can pile into a single moment, in effect distorting time. And what happens to a place, what is captured, when you compile all of those “moments” into a single frame? What’s left?

“Ten hours” is a sort of metaphysical answer to this question in that these images are the result of ten-hour long exposures made by leaving my pinhole camera out overnight, taking a ten-hour long exposure. I consider the result a sort of meditation on the slowing down of time, and a portrait of that specific chunk of time of that specific location.

Large format pinhole images shot on film, 32x40” Digital archival pigment prints.