Twenty Two Seconds in Chennai by Frank Cost

Twenty Two Seconds in Chennai

Frank Cost

Fossil Press

Twenty Two Seconds in Chennai Frank Cost Copyright ÂŠ 2006 Frank Cost and Fossil Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any mechanical or electronic means without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Published by Fossil Press 100 Parkwood Avenue Rochester, New York 14620 Distributed by lulu.com Printed in the United States by ColorCentric Corporation

For my students

Introduction I recently found myself riding in a taxi on a road in the city of Chennai in Southern India wishing that I had a video camera to record a small clip of the passing view to show to my family and friends back home. I had brought only my Canon 20D digital camera on the trip. The Canon camera is a wonderful tool for recording still images, but it cannot record video clips. However, the camera can shoot up to five frames per second when set in continuous shooting mode. So I decided that the next best thing to a video clip would be a continuous sequence of still images that I could view in rapid succession on the camera monitor to recreate the illusion of movement. To maximize the number of continuous frames I could record without suffering a pause to refresh the internal buffer, I set the image resolution to the lowest available setting. I then used the camera to record a sequence of images of the passing scenery. At five frames per second, the camera recorded 110 frames in 22 seconds. The camera also records the exact time of day each image is made. The sequence of images was recorded from 9:32:05 to 9:32:27 AM on February 14, 2006. (The clock in the camera was set to US Eastern Standard Time, so I had to add ten and a half hours to the recorded time to compensate for the time difference between New York and Chennai.) I am not sure of the exact location, but we were driving south with the morning sun rising in the east to our left. We were on our way to a beach resort on the Indian Ocean about 50 km south of the city. As soon as I had captured the sequence of images, I realized that in a mere 22 seconds I had acquired the content for a new book. Once home, I assembled the book in Adobe InDesign. No adjustments of any kind were made to the photographs. In effect, they flowed directly from the Canon camera into the book. From InDesign, I exported the book as a set of PDF files and uploaded them to Lulu.com, a web-based publishing service that allows anyone to publish books at no cost and make them available for purchase worldwide over the Internet. If it had taken more than a few hours to do all of this, the book would have forever remained an unrealized concept. Instead, when someone orders this book from the Lulu.com web site, the book is automatically printed on a Xerox iGEN3 digital color press, bound and finished inline, and shipped directly to the purchaser. The combination of the Lulu publishing engine and Xerox digital printing technology have removed the barriers that have heretofore prevented much content from finding its way into this wonderful ageless form of a book. Now that the book exists, I find that it challenges my thinking about how photography is best employed to depict places that have not been directly experienced by the viewer. Several people who have viewed this sequence of images have said to me that it

gives a more complete and more satisfying sense of how the place must actually appear than a collection of disconnected images one might find in an article in National Geographic magazine, or a “day-in-the-life” type picture book. Could it possibly be true that a sequential collection of photographs acquired almost automatically in less than half a minute has more credibility than a deliberately crafted and meticulously edited picture story? I think that in one important respect, the answer to this question is yes. By removing the controls normally exercised by the photographer and the editor, the subject is liberated. Each frame in this book speaks for itself. There is no evidence of selection or manipulation on the part of the photographer. No editor’s hand, influenced by any aesthetic, commercial, or political agenda, determined the content of these pages. That is perhaps why the experience of viewing this book does not seem to leave the same strange aftertaste that more traditional collections of photographs sometimes do—the sense that somehow one’s view of the world has been deliberately, if not maliciously distorted. Twenty Two Seconds in Chennai is the second in a new series of “instantaneous books” that I am creating to explore new possibilities for the book enabled by digital technology. Having captured the contents of this book in the way that I did, I did not try to anticipate how viewers would respond to it. Publishing the book took only a few hours of labor and no investment of money. Therefore I can easily afford to let you freely judge the book’s value for yourself. I hope you enjoy it!

Frank Cost February 22, 2006 Rochester, New York

Twenty Two Seconds in Chennai

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