1247 days on Whymark Avenue

This short film was created from a sequence of 1247 photographs taken in the same urban neighbourhood in North London over a period of 42 months. Photographs were taken daily from the same position, with a constant frame. Edited together, and viewed as a continuously moving image, they show the life of the site over time, at the rate of one frame per day – three years condensed into a little over three minutes. The image series is backed with a selection of site recorded sound from the same period.

This film is part of a larger research project on the longitudinal documentation of urban sites. The project uses repeat photography to study street art and graffiti as visual dialogue. Capturing these ephemeral forms of visual communication as they appear and disappear over time gives us a unique insight into graffiti and street art’s existence within a field of social interaction – as a form of democratic conversation on urban walls.

 
Susan Hansen, Middlesex University London
Susan Hansen coordinates the Visual Methods Group, and is the Chair of the Forensic Psychology Research Group, at Middlesex University, London. She has a background in Social Psychology, Communication Studies, and Art History. Her research explores communities’ material engagements with, and affective responses to urban environments; the analysis of graffiti as a form of visual dialogue; and the promise of an archaeological approach to understanding street art and graffiti through the longitudinal photo documentation (or repeat photography) of single sites.

Susan would like to thank Danny Flynn (London Metropolitan University) for his invaluable contribution earlier in the project.

Image © Susan Hansen