Claire Bain: You had to be there/Photosynth and Big-ass Prints

You Had To Be There
Photographs

With the exception of “Sylvia,” all of these photographs were made using the iPhone app called Photosynth. Photosynth stitches together multiple overlapping photographs into one image. It seems to have been designed with the intention of sending the photos to friends, who can look at them by either swiping their finger over their phone screen or moving the mouse around, the way Google Street View pictures can be viewed. But I like the flattened out photos. They are a compression of movement, several perspectives seen at once. They can capture different instants in time and put them all together, a quantum rolling pin. These photographs are all taken in built spaces; I enjoy using the app to interact with architecture.

View one of these in "3-d" by clicking here...(you will need to have theSilverlight software to view it...

Some of the images lend themselves to very large printing; I had them printed in black and white on bond paper, and then applied color (or not) to them according to the texture, line, and imagery in the photograph. I wanted to make large images that one can only experience in person, standing with them. They function as a hybrid of photography and painting. Those images whose final form are color photographs lend themselves better to printing than to hand-coloring.

Now click here to see a panorama of a hand-colored print of another panorama--fake hands, everything is FAKE!