Common Composite: Clocks by Ted Ollier
There's something compelling about composite photography, like that created by contender Ted Ollier. Tens, hundreds, or even thousands of overlaid images allow us to see trends and patterns that are invisible to the naked eye, or, as in the photograph above, an object in multiple states of existence.
Ted writes,
In a sea of undifferentiated grey, nothing sparks an interest. Add a speck, a dot, a mark--and something emerges from the gloom. Something draws the attention and the eye. Something engages the mind. The world is, and we are designed to analyze it in ways that baffle the most advanced digital computational systems we can devise. Blur it, average it, dice it, compress it, and the mind still gleans some sort of information from the inputs it is provided.
Ted's work reminded me of some of my favorite composite images from across the web, which can have the effect of diluting the individual object, while simultaneously evoking a a sense of awe in the surreal quality that the multiples creates. Jason Salavon takes Playboy centerfolds and layers them to show "the evolution of this form of portraiture" through the decades.
Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized), 2002 by Jason Salavon
Penelope Umbrico's 20x200 edition, 87 Suns From Fllickr - 29 Visible, culls nearly a hundred sunset photographs found on Flickr into a single, celestial image:
87 Suns From Flickr - 29 Visible by Penelope Umbrico
Ho-Yeol Ryu visualizes the trajectories of an entire day's worth of flights at the airport resulting in this image below:
Busy Airport by Ho-Yeol Ryu
Most recently, a new project by Joshua T. Nimoy made the rounds, declaring that the average color of more the 26,000 pieces of art in the collection of the MoMA produced this shade of brownish gray:
In addition to his composite photography, Ted, a self-proclaimed "armchair philosopher" has many other conceptual projects on his website in a diverse range of media like printmaking, sculpture, installation and sound. Browsing through, I began to wonder what a composite of all his experiments, or a composite of all the composites, would tell us about the works as a whole.