Time Frames: City Pictures

Time Frames, Michael Spano's long-awaited first monograph, catalogues the artist's exploration of spatial and temporal dimensions in photography. The book is divided into five "Panoramas", "Grids", "Portraits", "Multi-Exposures", and "Diptychs"; each employs a distinctive technical process to provide a new way of looking at life in New York City. "Panoramas" (1977-1983) show interacting urbanites moving through elongated frames as the lens of an extremely wide field camera pans during exposure. "Grids" (1980-1990) captures eight moments on a single negative as Spano moves through a sequence of events, pre-determinedly exposing a portion of the grid every four seconds. "Portraits" (1984-1990) focus on individual inhabitants transformed and etched out from their settings through the solarization and blurring forms into an atmospheric world. "Multi-Exposures" (1985-1998) combine solarizations with multiple perspectives. These single-negative layered compositions orchestrate and compress selected intervals of time and space into one image. "Diptychs" (1998-1999) fuse two distinct moments on one negative where scale, focal planes, and perspectives shift and comprise a dual image of urban spaces.