Ross Kelly - Photography 4

This body of work was born out of frustration with photography’s limited ability to describe a scene within a single frame. Its focus is on the city, as an environment that changes rapidly and constantly and which therefore defies photography's urge to “freeze”. The work commences by photographing an urban location using a long lens so that the view has to be captured in a series of smaller shots. The scene is photographed multiple times in a range of conditions and using a variety of film stock and aperture/speed settings in the camera. In this way, the location is recorded painstakingly across an immense spectrum. Selected images are then printed and collaged manually to create large scale works often containing thousands of individual photographs. While ostensibly a collage in nature, this work tries to adhere to its photographic roots by maintaining a rigid frame and by attempting to preserve the physical structure of the scene faithfully, as much as the process will permit. Each work is in some ways a “stitched” image that freely reveals its own nature as a construct rather then as an individual record.