Time lord
‘Emotions are based in time,’ American photographer David Fokos says, ‘and for me to get emotions across in my pictures I need to somehow include the element of time. My pictures are all about emotions – I’m not trying to show people what a place looks like, but what it feels like to be there.’
The speed with which we take pictures with our eyes is less about the frequency of the images received by our brain and more to do with the length of time we spend looking at something. That is how we experience a place, a person or a situation – via a gradual build-up of impressions made over the course of however long we can concentrate on one thing. When the situation is fleeting we may well view it with the effect of a very short shutter, but when we sit calmly on the rocks watching the sea our experience is a very different one. What we take away is borne of the multiple impressions we gather all blended into one. We feel different about a place after a good long stare instead of a passing glance, and it is this sense of how it feels to look for a long time that Fokos aims to capture in his images. He refers to it as ‘encoding time’ into his pictures.
A new world revealed
‘Our bodies perceive the world on
