Tag Archives: photography

We’re hosting Nicolas Maigret this weekend, a French artist here for the Gli.tc/h festival, and while talking about this and that he told me about a fellow artist, Cyrille Henry, who did a series of photographs in 2006 of train journeys compressed into a strips of colour which he calls Voyages.

Many thousands of photographs taken in still shot during a complete train trip provide the photographic material for the “Voyages”. They are then cut and compressed in “grains” and finally assembled into a singular image. Each “grain’s” position depends on the time of the shooting, enabling to show time unrolling from left to right. The whole of a voyage can then be captured and restored with all its nuances : speed, train station stops, clouds, etc.

It’s not a new idea, at least not now. You might be familiar with Moviebarcode where films are churned through an algorithm to reveal their dominant colours through time, and last year I did a small website for Adam Magyar’s Walking As One, where he got people to walk past a one pixel wide camera. There’s also the History of the Sky video which does a double compression of sorts.

What I like about Henry’s images is their almost scrappy uniqueness. He doesn’t have a large apparatus and he’s not using a commercially available source. His journeys are specific to the time and place and there’s an intimacy to the process that appeals to me. This one, of Paris to Rotterdam, is particularly nice as the reflection of the interior lights dominate as night falls.

A selection of his photos are on this page at surprisingly high resolution. The one at the top of this post is Poitier to Paris