PENTAGONAL POOL
“The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called ‘sciences as one would’. For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes … Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding.”
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
Recently I found a cache of the original files I'd made for an exhibition in 2004-5, Dry Light, which mainly made use of the digital images I'd been taking at the tail end of the project that had occupied my daily lunch hours back in my days of employment, photographing what I had dubbed the "pentagonal pool" on the Southampton University campus.
The idea behind these files was that, in order to compensate for the small maximum printable size of these digital files (mainly from a 3MB camera), I would arrange them in long panels of multiple images, which could usefully exploit the patterns and variations that arise when a single but extremely variable subject is photographed repetitively over a long period of time. To this end I created a number of large single files combining three or four photographs, which could be printed for framing on the "panoramic" paper that Epson used to sell (essentially an A2 sheet cut in half lengthways). I thought these files had gone missing long ago, but found them hiding in a sub-directory on a backup drive, and was pleasantly surprised by their quality; I decided they would finally find their niche in a Blurb “layflat” book.
