Geographer and designer Max Liboiron tells us that method is not only a way of doing, but a way of being in the world[1].

Photographs have become so often expendable; we store them, delete them, put them up on social media, rarely taking the time to either create them or to look at them. However, the millions of images we take are stored in increasing numbers of data centres, requiring increasing resources to run. Where speed and over consumption define much of everyday life for many of us, how can working with slow, and, where possible, more sustainable practices to create images, using plants, sunlight, matchboxes, affect our ways of being in the world, encourage us to be in the world differently?

These slow processes urge us to decrease our pace, to look slowly, and to look differently. A wave breaking on a beach; the texture of bark; a streetscape made otherworldly, timeless, by the light shining through a pinhole; a fern held still by light on photo sensitive paper.

Treating each image as precious creates space for another way of being in the world, drawing us in to look differently at what it holds. ‘Slow looking’ – “taking the time to carefully observe more than meets the eye at first glance”[2] - reveals hidden stories, and hidden beauty in imperfection: light damaged negatives become part of a collage, layers of family history seeping through each transparent square; scratches on the surface of a negative give strange depth of light and darkness; a plant shifted during the creation of a cyanotype print leaves a ghostly shape of what was once there; a streetscape held through a pinprick in a matchbox blurs the lines between past and present, allowing us to fill the absences with our own internal images and memories.

An antidote to consumerist culture.

Time, effort, expense of creating and printing each image urge slow looking.

It is significant also that this work was created in the descent from the light into the darkest point of winter – a time in this part of the world that urges slowness for hibernation, healing and seed planting, and for considering how we might find better ways of being on this earth.

Take the time to look slowly at each of these images.

Zoë O’Reilly, December 2024

[1] Max Liboiron, 2021.

[2] Shari Tishman, 2017.

A Certain Slant of Light is funded by an Arts Council Participation Project Award.