Downtown Site I

Downtown Site I

The City Scenes are complicated compositions built of images captured over an extended period of time and compiled into a single, cinematic image.

Details from the Composition

Nancy Richardson’s large-scale scenes are montaged from archives of digital images shot at various times of day, light, weather-often over a period of weeks, sometimes years. On a computer screen, the images look like tracking footage from a video camera. A day’s rushes from a movie set. As in movie making, unexpected narratives emerge in the editing process. Time is compressed and so is space. Figures appear more than once. The use of a range of camera lenses allows the composition to look sharp from the foreground cobblestones to a stream of people crossing the street a block away. Standing near the image, a viewer is invited to read the scene incident by incident. At that remove, details seem realistic yet the scene quickly reveals itself to be an illusion.