Our mate Jay Mark Johnson, whose work hung on the walls of the first SHFT pop-up shop, uses an $85,000 slit camera to create these abstracted images that emphasize time over space. It’s a complicated process, as Slate’s Judith Herman explains:
This unique look is possible because the fixed-position slit camera registers only a vertical sliver of a scene. Whatever passes that slit by gets registered in a narrow line. Over a period of time, which Johnson can control, it registers line after line. The final result is a bunch of these lines all pushed together. (In this sense, you could say each photograph is actually a composite of hundreds of very skinny images.)
Understood? Yeah, us neither. Technical explanations aside, the surreal photos offer an expanded view of real, everyday scenes. Says Jay, “It shows us that what we see is a product of our cultural traditions and means of perception.”
(via Behold)