Scott McFarland

Scott McFarland's work reconsiders the traditional concept of a photograph as the depiction of a single captured moment in time. Through digital means, his photographs combine multiple negatives to represent simultaneous temporalities within a single image. Several different moments are folded into what appears to be one densely packed instant. McFarland photographs the same location in the same scale and perspective over a period of time and employs digital processes to seamlessly interweave selected elements into a cohesive whole. The photographs are meticulously constructed illusions created within the formal language of documentary photography.



McFarland's photographs illustrate the possibilities of foregoing the technological and phenomenological limitations of single exposure photography. In each image, small clues such as inconsistent shadows and out of season fauna and foliage demonstrate the ability of digital technology to manipulate composition, color, light, space, shape, and form. This pictorial conception of photography as a built picture was brought about by the artist's own considerations of the artificial nature of built spaces, such as those found in gardens and zoos. In these constructed spaces, there is also a disruption to the natural pattern and order of things. In McFarland's work, the viewer's understanding of what they see or think they see is challenged. Fundamental questions concerning the relationship between time and space arise and one is left wondering and imaging what is real and what lies beneath.






"McFarland, by melding several temporalities of one subject in the same photograph, denies photography's homogeneous time, commonly conceived as an instant. Rather, he explores photographic space as positively linked to time as duration and succession, in the lineage of nineteenth-century photographic experiments. In doing so, he considers the notion of representation as an intensive, rather than a repetitive, mode, not copying but presenting an object in its complex spatial and temporal realities. McFarland's photographs fascinate in their comprehension of what a space is. They also offer a multi-layered consideration of photography's representational potential."
(Vincent Honoré. Vitamin Ph New Perspectives in Photography, published by Phaidon Press Limited, New York, 2006, p. 182)