Interview by Johanna Korhonen

How did you become interested in capturing time?
The reasons are numerous, some more abstract, some more immediate. When I started university, I continued my interest in visual communication and went on to study graphic information design. That is, graphic design with a focus on information design. A major preoccupation of graphic information designers is creating representations of changes - of various kinds - over time.
My introduction to interactive multimedia only strengthened these interests. With new media, the audience has the possibility to not only access time based material such as video and audio, but to also navigate their way through it in a path of their choosing.
When encountering a video or audio file, the viewer typically knows little more about the clip than what it's supposed to be about and its length. How, I wondered, could one represent - map - the material such that people could get an overview of the material, be more guided in their path through it, without having to go through it all. Essentially, I was interested in representing changes happening over time. Several experiments, producing various interfaces for audio and visual material, were made. Then life took a slightly different path and I ended up creating other kinds of representations, for a while.
Yet later, my previous studies, involving experimental new media, finished. I moved back to the area where I had grown up, in eastern Denmark and southern Sweden. My father had put up my late childhood home for sale. The house and its surroundings had given me some of my happiest and most significant moments. I decided I wanted to "immortalize" the place somehow. The most characteristic aspect of the house, located in Denmark, is its view across Øresund, the water between Sweden and Denmark. This view became my focus.
First I simply photographed the view for twenty-four hours, and put all the 240 small images onto a large print. Then, seeing the result, and thinking about it more, I came up with the idea of producing the twenty-four hour images I have since pursued.
(Of course, I only knew that the house would be sold, not exactly when. So, given that I was to "guard" the house once a month, I kept bringing my photography gear, and photographed the same motif, once a month until the house changed owners, about nine months later.)
To realize my twenty-four hour image concept, I needed to write my own software. It wasn't until the software was finished that I first saw what my image-making concept really looked like. The first image knocked me off my feet. It was magic.
Bitten by the desire to "produce magic", I continued. As I did, I become increasingly aware and fascinated with all that the images express, the processes they reveal in nature as well as society.

What will you tell with your twenty-four hour pictures?
The initial inspiration for making the twenty-four hour images was to immortalize a view from an emotionally significant location I was about to lose access to.
But, as I've made more images and learned more about what this new way of seeing time and space can express, I've also come to appreciate it for other reasons dear to me. Since an early age, I've had a significant nature-interest. What I realized was that my time images make accessible, the way this "being" that nature is, changes through time. Humans' capacity to remember events happening over longer stretches of time is limited. My images allow one to "see" movement - such as nature's - over a longer period of time, to understand and appreciate it more. One sees clouds' movements, how the wind has changed, how the sea's flow has changed direction, how and when fog, rain sets in, and, not in the least for photographers, how the color of objects change with different cloud-covers.
My decision to use the interval of twenty-four hours is a very conscious decision. It's a fundamental cyclic unit of time for humankind. Making images spanning twenty-four hours allows the viewer to see a continuum of natural and human (more on that later), activity.
As I mentioned above, I photographed the same view, roughly once a month for nine months. This allowed me to reach beyond the confines of the twenty-hour continuum, in terms of seeing nature's movements. The results are quite interesting. My dream is to photograph a motif a year, to more totally depict the cyclical quality of nature. (Of course <grumble> with global warming, the weather keeps changing from year to year....so it's difficult to capture something entirely repetitive).
Having "discovered" what this way of representing motifs reveals of nature's patterns, I realized it can do something similar for human activity. The twenty-four hour images show when people are active, when they wake, go to work, build, rest, come home, sleep, holiday, go out, and so on. The twenty-four hour images tell the story of human activity in a different way. They're a new kind of narration.

Tell me briefly and easily your technique? How did you invent this technique?
It's funny, a year or two after having developed my technique I discovered other new media people and photographers doing similar things. The larger difference was that most others were using analogue techniques.
The easiest way to explain my technique is to describe how it's done using analogue technology. To make time images, let's focus on the negative. It is principally the only aspect of a camera that differs between a still image camera and a 'time camera'. Imagine that one has a negative that's covered completely by a mask of some sort. This mask has a thin horizontal or vertical slice in it, and a mechanism to move this slice across the negative. This construction allows exposing different parts of the negative at different times.
Imagine. At the beginning of the time interval one wants to capture, the slice is positioned at one end of the negative. The mechanism moves it such that the slice reaches-exactly-the other end of the negative, when the time-interval is over. Consequently, during the chosen time interval, all parts of the negative are exposed. This results is an image showing the motif over a span of time.
In essence, all I do is what I described above, but digitally. I've written some software to do this. One of the most distinguishing differences between doing this using analogue and digital means, is the digital possibility to control the segment and movement of time across an image, as well as creating animations of all this changing. When I've made the software easy to use for anyone but a programmer, I look forward to releasing it, freely.

When you capture time with this system, do you really take photographs or video?
It's an interesting "digital vs. analogue philosophical" question. The short answer is that I capture still images-between fifteen and thirty seconds apart, over a longer period of time. Of course, video is nothing but still images captured and shown at 25 frames per second, so the difference is a relative one - I just take images a little less frequently than video. I use a still image camera because the camera equipment to produce high resolution images is far less expensive than video-not to mention portable.
The important difference would be between analogue and digital media. Analogue media-such as photographic film-allow one to capture completely continuous moments, whereas digital media capture discrete moments in time.