Knapek creates imagery based on time, which he has been delveloping for some time. It is vaguely based on slit-scan photography, although he writes as though he is unaware of the technique. His basic work comprises of time lapse images shown as one single image, allowing us to see multiple moments in time, all in one instant.
In his early work, we see a few hours presented as one image, we see the sun and moon streak across the sky. The difference between this type of image and a slow shutter speed is that everything is exposed correctly and rendered sharply across the frame, rather than being blurred and having extremities of light and dark. What is most interesting is the movement of the sun.
When he developed his technique further, Knapek was able to produce an image of an entire 24 hours, from midnight to midnight, showing a transition from night to day in a single frame. It is strange how there is little twilight shown to us. Conceptually the work begins to be underpinned by titles, such as “Second shortest day” showing that the work is about time and the sun, rather than merely an interesting technique.
This piece documents a train journey, each veritcle line is from a different photograph, which is compressed horizontally to allow us to view all the images in a smaller, panoramic space. The image becomes a trace of the journey, an image of space and time, and how the artist travelled through it.
Finally I wanted to look at this piece of work, which isn’t actually photographic, instead it is a technological trace of the sun. Each dot is representative of the strenght of the sun at a certain time and date, with dates horizontally and time vertically. It is interesting to see how Knapek’s work has developed from his early experiments into this, quite advanced, and technically driven, trace of the Sun.