Hugh Pryor
About
As a former student of animation at Farnham, I’ve always maintained an interest in motion, however it’s not always been in the form of animation. Photography offers the opportunity to experiment with many forms of motion, whether that’s running around with a sparkler or using a laser as a giant bar code scanner on a dancer, or combining video frames to visualise the motion of a flock of birds. The key to my practice is to turn our endlessly moving world into something that is still, beautiful and tangible.
Like a moth I’m drawn to lights – we’re lucky to be living through a lighting revolution with LEDs, laser and microchip-controlled lighting. Through the design and creation of sometimes elaborate lighting set-ups, worlds of movement are opened up. All too often abstraction takes over; however, fascinating things happen on the boundaries between pictorial representation of a subject and meaningless chaos.
When you open the camera’s shutter for a long exposure, you are inviting all the movement in the scene to land on the camera’s sensor and record itself. The subject becomes the shutter – eclipsing the light source and creating the boundaries between light and dark.
With the new outlook these techniques show the world, phenomena such as the patterns of wind, turbulence, clouds, swarms of flies, flocks of birds, traffic, people, dancers, fair ground rides, and one’s own motion in the form of luminous performances, are freed from the dimension of time.