For some time now I have been reflecting on the images that I made in summer 05 along the Northern Irish border (see “Crossing” blog. Wednesday, October 19 2005). Although I am still keen on a number of the images I had the feeling that I wanted to consider a more transformative use of digital photography, a less straight forward approach.

With this in mind I did a trial last week of and idea that I had to photograph 100m of border and compress it into a single metre or photographic space in the form of 100 strip off 100cm x 1cm.

I set off with my folding wooden ruler, digi cam and hiking boots to produce 100 full images for my first test.



I used the ruler to frame a photograph to just include 1 meter along its width and then cut out 1cm wide strips from each file and assembled them to make the 1m x 1m square which I then printed to get an idea of what I thought of the result.








I like the way the lines start to resemble scanning lines and the associated thoughts that I get about scanning and sampling landscapes, and references to surveillance.I intend to make more of these images as I think a richness might emerge through multiples. I also prefer them when viewed on a computer screen because of their luminosity and so they might work better on a light box as opposed to being reflective prints.