Project Description
One Year is a project through which I intend to construct a daily photographic record of a single view: the view from my study window at around 8.00a.m. each day when I sit down to work. One Year will annotate each picture with a note of the weather for that morning and the morning’s main news headline from the BBC News site. In addition, there will be a note taking a key sentence or two from my daily journal.
March 14th 2014
Light cloud
Labour stalwart Tony Benn dies at 88
Embracing Revelation’s two thousand years of holiness, Dewdrop leaves by night without saying goodbye, and his wife and children remind themselves to forget
March 15th 2014
Sunny intervals
Missing jet ‘deliberately diverted’
But then, Agamemnon in New York has a certain ring to it
March 16th 2014
Sunny
Crimea holds secession referendum
Old men linger, the caretaker generation
March 17th 2014
Sunny intervals
EU mulls Russia sanction over Crimea
Guarding buildings and books. Remembering.
March 18th 2014
Light rain shower
China begins land search for plane
We walk up Cambridge Heath Road, past Bethnal Green tube, and on to Hackney. Victoria Park Road is on our right
March 19th 2014
Light cloud
Osborne to deliver ‘Budget for resilient UK’
I stand before the green front door and ring the bell. I’ve never got round to asking Ramona why she hasn’t painted it yellow.
March 20th 2014
Light cloud
Australia sees possible plane debris
A Julian calendar is pinned to the wall and looks down as she screams and flounders in bathwater turned chill.
Artist Statement
… “natural history” has no actual existence other than through the process of human history, the only part which recaptures this historical totality, like the modern telescope whose sight captures, in time, the retreat of nebulae at the periphery of the universe.
Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle
The purpose of this project is to explore continuity and change. Over the course of a year, I will build up a daily visual record of the same view. Despite my best efforts, though, I will not be able to replicate the ‘same’ view each day: it is subject to changes in the environment, such as the weather or the time the sun rises. But it is also affected by changes caused by me, the observer. For instance, my feelings that morning may change the way I hold the camera or, inadvertently, the image may show my breath on the glass from getting too close to the window.
Looking out at the view on this, the first morning of One Year, I see a scene comprising sky, trees and rooftops. I don’t see much evidence of human activity just yet, but that may come later in the year when the leaf cover begins to thin out. Being on a flight path, we also see the odd vapour trail or aeroplane light in the sky too.
Some of the changes that will become evident will be pretty obvious, such as the seasons. Other changes will be more subtle. My daily notes will give some insight into what is going on inside my head that morning, from my journal entry, and there will also be a record of what is happening in the world in general, from the news headline.
But the ‘view’ I am recording in One Year is not neutral, it is selected and framed by me. Similarly, my journal extracts are selected from a much larger body of work; it is the ‘insight’ into my thinking that I choose to present. Even the ‘news headline’ cannot be regarded as neutral, for it is subject to BBC editorial bias.
But there is a third party in the One Year process, one that is outside of my control. That person is you, the reader of this blog, the interested observer of the project. I want people to bring their own interpretations, views and insights to this project. All comments received will be reproduced in my weekly project reports.
