Kinetic sculpture Jason Shulman has mastered the art of turning films into photographs.
Ultra-abridged versions of popular films aren’t new. But Londonbased artist Jason Shulman has taken the concept of reduction to the extreme, and he’s done it without removing one frame. His celebrated series Photographs of Films distills entire movies into single longexposure images.
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Which means you can now essentially hang all all 93 minutes of Trainspotting in your lounge. The body of work, which has been exhibited at the likes of Photo London and The Cob Gallery, emerged from a process of experimentation.
‘I started by shooting long exposures of sporting events to see whether I would get a distillation that was evocative,’ Shulman explains. He then progressed to movies, assuming that they would probably produce ‘an uninteresting flat slab of tone’. And that was the result for most of the 900+ movies he photographed, but every now and then, magic happened – an intriguing hodgepodge of pattern and colour that resonated with the film as a whole. With their ghostly figures and forms, they’re mesmerising, otherworldly, powerful triggers for the imagination.
