- Venue
- Pickfords House Museum
- Location
- East Midlands
Anthony Carr’s exhibition A Month of Nights at Pickford’s House, Museum of Georgian Life forms part of the Format photography festival in Derby. Not that one would instantly recognise this when first entering the room where the show is situated. Instead of what ordinarily might be expected, one is confronted by a series of vitrines whose glass has been obscured by wooden sheets, in which various holes have been punched. They function like some kind of strange anthropological time capsules or ‘what the butler saw’. Perhaps the holes cut in the wood might have enabled the more furtive viewing the artist apparently intended, had they resembled peep holes rather than the larger port holes present; and likewise some kind of individual compartments or tubular viewing apparatus might have eliminated the issue of being able to simultaneously view multiple images from each aperture. Nonetheless, we are evidently not dealing with a typical outing of photography.
In advance of Format, Carr installed two dozen of his home made pinhole cameras throughout the city centre of Derby. These were cunningly devised to repeatedly open their shutters for a single hour at a specific time each day, during nocturnal hours. Thus, the images progressively accrued atmosphere; to evoke the memories of how it feels to be in a certain place at a given nightly hour.
Carr’s work appears to be a filmic attempt to overcome the stasis of photography by imbuing it with an elongated sense of the temporal. His photographs are not about the moment, but instead coagulate the frenetic nature of modern life into a more pedestrian timbre. Motion is translated into softly agitating lines; so that some images for example, have recorded the nocturnal passage of the stars, or in one case, the moon’s orbit through a month of nights; it’s celestial passage burnt in curvilinear light. Alternatively, in photos such as Camera 58 11pm-Midnight, Cathedral Green, the passage of traffic is transformed into alien traces of streaming car headlights, whilst traffic lights dance about drunkenly in Camera 73 2-3am, Behind Assembly Rooms. These visual quirks extend into grass that somehow seems snow laden – perhaps due to the sodium glow of streetlights and buildings that are seemingly covered with condensation. Indeed, it is true that some of the shots are virtually blurred beyond recognition. Yet, they are not out of focus, but focussed on something other than clarity of image; in other words, the evocation of place.
It is a notion of place that seems to have been recorded by some kind of archaic, low-fi and clandestine means of observation. Carr then heightens these notions of surveillance through the presence of one his nest box cameras in the gallery space; observing us, observing his works. One final interesting touch in the exhibition’s layout is the map Carr has displayed. This shows the locations of all the cameras, successful or otherwise, with each denoted by a coloured pin. These resemble the digital equivalents that we are increasingly becoming accustomed to when using google maps or our i-phones to navigate about town.
Overall, one feels encouraged to conclude that Carr’s photographs are not the product of fortuitous luck, or what Henri Cartier-Bresson described as ‘the decisive moment’, but rather the consequence of an elongated process in which the passage of time was central. The continuous nature of the filming means scant regard has been paid to the fussy niceties of composition; instead Carr’s cameras simply record everything that occurs with the grime of daily life evident. So in the blurred and pot marked negatives, there’s the grubby sense of city life and the dirt under the fingernails that is sadly lacking in the digital realm.
