24 Exposures Daily

The prescribed lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic has had an emotive impact on our lives and the relationships we maintain with our immediate surroundings. Looking at and re-encountering the spaces around us has allowed a new way to develop of seeing the familiar.

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Sleep and prolonged periods of forced rest have become an everyday feature of life. Inactivity, both physical and mental, together with a lack of daily routine, has resulted in our world spinning into a featureless haze of what was before. Days become difficult to define and place without the routine of a working week as time passes in a dreamlike blur. Repetition and an empty familiarity has replaced the structure of varied and functional lives, paused as society takes unprecedented measures to combat the contagious Coronavirus.

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With non-essential travel banned under the lockdown regime, limited daily exercise sees us spending time in our immediate surroundings. These often overlooked and familiar spaces, visited previously as part of a transitory journey, have now found a new relevance of their own. Spaces accessible to us have adopted new surreal importance and value, reconciled by the limitations of the global lockdown.

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When creating this body of work, the use of a finite amount of long-expired 35mm film has added a further demand on the image-making process. With limited resources available, one 24 exposure film was shot each day over six days until the film ran out. The precious potential of each exposure has resulted in observed images being recorded of the spaces around me that remain accessible under the one hour of recommended daily exercise. These familiar local places and the time spent within them, have gained a new currency that is more important than ever before. Being outside represents a valuable opportunity to remember normality. Multiple exposures and overlapping frames contribute to the metaphoric blur of life under the confines of the lockdown and underscore the valued opportunities to escape the confines of home. The vivid and unpredictable colour shifts of the long-expired film present a link to the perceived lack of control we are experiencing and the surreal reality of the unstructured days we now find ourselves in as the pandemic continues.

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Artist Statement

My creative practice is centred around photography of the landscape and the agency that can be formed between place, artist and visual outcome. The notion of what we consider to be place within space is an area of interest within my image making.

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www.michael-crocker.co.uk

@photomike1981