WILLIAM P. HAMLIN
My work is about the constraints of photography - the limitations of trying to capture a three-dimensional world in a flat photograph. By weaving my photographs together I have transformed a two dimensional image into a three-dimensional interpretation of the original. The final piece is a combination of two copies of the exact same photograph woven together to create a new version of the scene I photographed. In this way the images are also about a manner of looking at things. It is a way for me to further re-create what I was seeing and the woven image is more true to the experience of viewing a subject. How we see the world is not all at once but in separate glances which are built up. Just as we continuously accumulate details across time, the woven images layer time and also layer observation. The viewer is compelled to examine and re-examine the woven photograph.
Although the photograph was taken in a small slice of time, how I viewed what I photographed was done over a period of time. By manipulating the final image it becomes more about my experience of viewing. Because the images are woven together the surface of the photograph is broken and it is both whole and hundreds of micro-perspectives. By breaking up the surface through the weaving the images become principally about vision and how we see and less about their subjects. The photograph is broken into a myriad of tiny squares, which are viewed simultaneously as whole but upon closer look each square reveals itself as a separate vision of the whole.
BH
