Time-lapse photography makes sense as a way to show time passing, as with a sun setting, a flower opening, or crowds moving through Tokyo. It’s fun to watch and can produce interesting results that we can’t see with the naked eye. It’s often used in films and movies as CG to capture the dynamic change of cities growing or society changing. Yet I haven’t seen it used much in fine art, probably because it can be seen as a pop culture gimmick, much like color photography wasn’t acceptable to art photographers until the 1960s. So with this in mind, I wanted to see if I could do something a bit different that might challenge how I look at the approach of time and space through time-lapse. This short loop was made in Japantown in San Francisco around Christmas 2023 by placing my digital camera against a large mirror wall with shoppers walking past. At first glance, it may look like a video effect with flipped duplicate movies. But what I find interesting is that it wasn’t an effect since the left half is the physical mirror. At one point in the video, I do in fact flip the video to hopefully create a subtle shift in how the scene is viewed, although it’s almost imperceptible. Whether this is interesting as art is still a question to me but as an experiment, I think the physical mirror approach raises questions about perception, which I hope to continue playing around with.

Music track is “Ginkgo” by I Am Robot And Proud.