SIMON NORFOLK – TIME TAKEN
2015-08-17Between 2013 and 2014 Simon Norfolk visited the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan, an area of the country once famous for its 170 foot tall Buddhas and more so now for their demise at the hands of the Taliban in 2001. Setting up his camera at over a dozen locations over a twelve-month period, Norfolk looked to depict the slow, silent release of the seasons in ‘a year long un-blinking honesty.’
“The winter snow marches up to the summer peaks and then slowly returns, like the gentlest of waves lapping on a lakeshore. The surface of a field rises when it is full of crops and falls again when it is harvested. When the branch of a tree is full of sap it is heavy and it leans; in the autumn it is lighter and it ebbs.’” (Simon Norfolk)
A copse of trees, a pair of deserted Soviet tanks, a boarded up town at the foot of the mountains; these anchors of the landscape provide the backdrop as we watch the seasons slip into one another. Described by Norfolk as being like the stanzas of a love poem to the Afghan landscape, time unfurls seamlessly in the photographs. Seeking to define the space between the works as much as the images themselves, Time Taken is the first in a three part series of ‘stratographs,’ studies in the passing of time.
Opposite – Time Taken 6, Early Spring
Exhibition runs through to September 8th, 2015
Michael Hoppen Gallery
3 Jubilee Place
London
SW3 3TD
