Slow Looking and Photographic Patience
Alon Koppel's long-exposure lake views
When it rains, it pours. Two weeks ago, I caught the norovirus bug, which took me down for five days. Then, I got a reprieve until I got a cold last Monday, which knocked me out for the rest of the week. My point is, I’m sick of being sick. Still, there are benefits to disrupting our ordinary routines. And it’s always a good reminder that these bodies aren’t almighty. We can’t take them for granted.
Kristen was away last week, so besides being under the weather, I had a lot of time to reflect and be in my head. Who am I becoming? How have I changed over time? I watched a few films, finished a novel, and started another. The cold was a drag, but the me time was valuable, and I found myself attaining a kind of attention I hadn’t experienced in a long time.
Still, I checked my social media apps daily and found myself grumbling about the speed of the new Foto app I’ve been exploring recently. I can’t blame them; Michael and his team are just getting started and have onboarded thousands of new users. They’ll figure it out eventually.
I'm not proud of my impulses when it comes to social media. Patience is a virtue! At the same time, speed is an expectation of any mobile app experience, and my first instinct was impatience. But I am a student of mindfulness, and I believe that attention is a practice we need to cultivate. All this to say: what’s wrong with a slow app? Good things come to those who wait, right? Chill out, dude.
Then, today, photographer Alon Koppel emailed some new work from Lake Horizon, a series he’s been making as an artist-in-residence at the Tusen Takk Foundation in Leland, Michigan. I’ve been following Alon’s work for years, and what always inspires me about his approach is his take on slow photography. He’s an architectural photographer by trade, but much of his personal work focuses on conceptual landscape, time, and repetition. Alon’s landscapes typically require fifteen-minute exposures; some can take up to thirty minutes. In a word, Alon is patient. I admire that. Slow looking can pay dividends.
I asked Alon what inspired these images and his way of working. He replied:
I love many aspects of long exposure photography and have been embracing/experimenting with it for years. First, there is an aspect of slowing down time and compressing fifteen, thirty minutes or more into a single layer of visual information. Then there is the aspect of creating an image that our normal eyes and brains can’t create on their own. Maybe this is how trees experience time?
Finally, there is a personal aspect of almost meditating when the image is being created. After I setup the camera I either stand by it or sit nearby and look at the landscape change while the camera records it. I listen to the waves and wave to the seagulls. I am trying to be entirely in the moment while the camera does its thing on a tripod. Another aspect of the meditating quality of the final series is that I go back to the same spot every day, sometimes several times a day.
The Tusen Takk Residency offers so much to discover outdoors and indoors, with their excellent facilities for artists. It’s rare just to create and think about art for a month. I am grateful for every moment I am here and hope the photos convey that.
I love that! Typically, we think of photography as slicing the world into pieces at a rapid-fire clip. Indeed, that’s how it works most of the time. But those artists who approach their imagemaking as Alon does, from the vantage point of a slow observer waiting patiently behind the camera over many sessions to see what accumulates, find something else entirely — a deep time vision of the world. I think that’s beautiful.
Patience is indeed a virtue. And our always-on digital culture doesn’t reward it—quite the opposite. The social media scroll is practically begging us to swipe up to the next thing before we’ve even begun to appreciate what we’re looking at. I know my Foto app's laggy load time is a bug. But it’s not entirely bad to make me wait. Slowing down is good for us. The world was never meant to move this quickly.
You can read more about Alon on the Tusen Takk Foundation website and follow him on Instagram @alonkoppel. Thanks for sharing these pictures with us, Alon. Beautiful work!
One more thing…
For months, I have eagerly anticipated Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet’s new film, Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other. It’s getting a UK release on March 21, and I can’t wait to see it. I watched the trailer again the other day, and it brought me to tears. Tim Adams wrote a review for The Guardian today, and it looks terrific. Let me know if you get to see this film. I want to hear what you think.
Okay, that’s all for now. It’s going to be sunny and warm in Madison today — nearly 60 degrees! We’ll be out in the garden pruning hydrangeas and soaking up the Vitamin D. I hope you have a wonderful day wherever you are in the world. More soon!
Beautiful examples of slow photography I've not seen before Andy, thank you for sharing Alon's work - also I'm looking forward to seeing Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other, it looks superb!
Thank you, Andy for supporting photographers near and far! I always love reading your newsletter and it's huge joy for me to be featured today.
For those who are interested in reading more about my process and my current residency at Tusen Takk, please follow right here in Substack: https://notlikehere.substack.com or find me on Instagram @alonkoppel – thank you all for looking and reading!