Artist Focus-- David Crawford

In Crawford's project, Stop Motion Studies, the artist took series of photographs of common people occupying public space. His focus upon the riders in the Tokyo subways was the major stop motion study I watched. In the study, Crawford focuses upon one person or one group of people at one time, then collects approximately 5 or 6 pictures of the subject in a quick succession-- enough to infer motion when placed in order and played forward. Crawford did just that in arranging these similar but subtly different images in an order and allowing the accessed image to play in a loop. Perhaps the images are not ordered, but dispersed and placed alongside one another to appear to be moving in a subtly differentiated but nevertheless repetitive way. In any event, the result is a montage of images that appear to play back the actions of a specific individual or group on the subway over a span of time.

To play back this tiny series of actions on loop, the total series in each case documenting probably less than thirty seconds of action and interaction, gives the illusion that the actions are repetitive over a long span of time. Other stop-action films and photomontages use photos taken over a span of time (such as every minute, every ten minutes, every hour) for an extended period time, then play them back chronologically to allow us to see a grand sort of change and pattern in the larger world. Essentially, stop motion functions to show larger change "in real time," in a way comprehensible in an incredibly reduced period of time. It makes the macroscopic microscopic so we can better understand it. This work of stop-motion, however, shows the movement and the progress of just a moment across an infinite span of time--- herein, it essentially does the opposite of what a typical stop-motion film does, making the microscopic macroscopic.

It seems to me that this is Crawford's genius: he gives us the opportunity to not just indulge in a sort of voyeurism to better understand quotidian people in their natural habitat, but to boil down this experience to one moment and freeze it, allowing us to explore the moment so much more intimately. It's an almost Impressionistic version of the flaneur, exploring a frozen (yet actively moving) moment in a frame to understand the state of their lives, of Paris better. I think the way Crawford lets us explore the multitude of different expressions and actions captured-- humorous, dramatic, serene, and so on.