Drift 10, Grand Beach, Manitoba (L), 2001

David Burdeny  

"Drift is a series of moving and still photographic images shot with film, collected during travels through Canada, France, Japan, England, Belgium and the USA. These photographs catalogue the shifting light and color of the world's oceans and shorelines. Using a variety of analogue and digital mediums that closely parallel racetrack photo finish technology, the images invert conventional photographic motion/time relationships. My intention is to present motion rendered still, and still rendered in motion, graphically revealing the underlying rhythms and patterns of the physical world while tracing our navigation through it.

“The Drift series was my first attempt to manifest some of my ideas in a photograph. For this work, I used a round-shot panoramic camera, which is as much a machine that makes pictures, as it is an optical device that sees an image. It's a fascinating little camera that's a modern reinterpretation of a Kodak Cirkut rotating panoramic camera that I had been introduced to during my interior design studies. I had originally intended to make very long exaggerated panoramas much like the Cirkut made, but it came with an interesting feature that would hold the camera still and just move the film, so I began experimenting with that option and the Drift series was born. I was conceptually thinking of the series as kaleidoscopic in reach where all parts of the world were reduced to earth/ocean and sky bound by the horizon, so I travelled around with it and made a series of abstractions that blurred (no pun intended) the distinction between sky, land and water.""