SPOTLIGHT: Christopher Robin Duncan Finds Meaning in Time’s Passing on ‘Poems,’ His New Book of Photographs
MULTIMEDIA ARTIST CHRISTOPHER ROBIN DUNCAN NEVER SET OUT TO BE A PHOTOGRAPHER - he had made a name for himself with his unique painted textile art. But as he continued to explore new ways to express himself artistically, he found himself reaching for a decades-old film camera.
“I got involved in proper photography through the back end—through a wild process of discovery,” Duncan describes. “I’ve gone from painting to making painterly work via natural forces and then engaging with time via a standard 35mm camera.”
Now Duncan has compiled those images into a beautiful book of art photography, Poems, which is now available via Deadbeat Club Press. The collection is available in both a standard edition and a limited run special edition. Poems is a stunning and thought-provoking set of photographs that explores how we experience time, space, and memory.
Given the do-it-yourself environment Duncan grew up in, it’s not surprising that he felt the freedom to try out a new form of artistic expression.
“I grew up in a cultural moment in the 80s that revolved around skateboarding and kids making their own music and zines and making their own everything,” Duncan says. “So I grew up around people doing all these cool things, but it took me a long time to find my own voice.”
Duncan has found success in several different artistic mediums, including painting and combining visual art with sound. However, he discovered one of his unique contributions to the art world through a happy accident.
One winter, he and his wife hung thick quilts over their windows to warm their home. When they took the quilts down in the spring, they found that the sun had bleached and faded them, and in doing so had etched interesting patterns into the fabric. Duncan was in awe of the designs put in place by the sun’s light, and he began using the sun-damaged fabric as the foundation for his works of art.
“I had been on this hunt for my voice, and I found my voice in nature and time passing in this way,” Duncan says.
Duncan continued to do this fabric work, and he would usually expose the materials he was using to the sun for six months. Only then would nature’s patterns be revealed, and it was this opportunity to get away from the desire to see immediate results and wait for time to do its work that drew Duncan to film photography.
“I was drawn to the developing process of the film and the unknown,” he says. “I might take four or five sets of pictures, and by the time I’m on the sixth set, I don’t remember what I took pictures of. Time is moving again, and the unknown rears its head. There’s something magical about that—the magic that I found in the sun exposure process suddenly became quite apt with the standard film development process.”
For the photographs that make up Poems, Duncan used a half-frame 35mm film camera. The half-frame camera prints two images on each exposure of the film, one on each side, so that if you have a 24-exposure film roll, you can take 48 images. Duncan uses the properties of the half-frame camera as the conceptual foundation of the project, pairing together images that show how a specific scene has changed as time passes, often with a slight shift in position or focus.
“What became interesting to me was rapid-firing two shots with slight perspective shifts,” Duncan says. “I found it really rewarding, and it allowed me to ponder these cycles or moments. I slowed down, because it wasn’t immediate. I feel like immediacy is the cause of a lot of problems—in the world, and in art.”
The collection can be viewed in several ways, allowing each person to experience the art in the way that resonates most with them, or to explore how viewing the images in a different order shifts the story they tell.
The pages of the book are loose-leaf, and if you view the images in the original order, you will see one half of each pair of half-frame shots alongside another image that provides an echo of or comment on the first image. You can then rearrange the order of the book’s leaves to experience the series in a new way. Finally, if you pull out each leaf and view it separately, you will see the two half-frame images that were taken in the same setting, often just moments apart.
This structure provides a unique viewing experience that keeps Duncan’s original pairings intact while also allowing a new piece of a mesmerizing narrative to fall into place with each page turn.
“The fact that it’s unbound, that allows people to create their own story. I think there’s a generosity to it. It made sense to lean into it being contained but unbound. I think that perhaps relates to how we all experience our own time.”
One of the collection’s many stunning pairs of images harkens back to Duncan’s work in textiles. After his sun exposure art began to take off, he started hanging the fabrics he would work with anywhere he could. In this set of images from Poems, he captures one of his fabrics floating in the wind at two different moments. Between the two moments in time, the fabric takes on a different shape, and the sun’s light filters through in a different way.
“What I was seeing was so beautiful, and the blue was vibrating in a way,” Duncan says of the moment he took the photographs. “I loved the shadows that were coming and the way it was moving.”
Another set of images shows the steam from an old steam engine train creeping across a pond and a forested backdrop like fog. You can also see the steam reflected in the pond’s still water.
“When the steam released, it bellowed out and over the water,” Duncan says. “It was magic. This is such a strange picture in the best way.”
A journey through Poems will also take you through grassy fields, rocky beaches, and the sun rising and setting. You’ll see urban landscapes, the inside of homes, and statues from cemeteries,
As you cycle through the images and absorb the narrative they create, you might even find yourself contemplating how you yourself move through time.
“Whatever your patterns are might not ever relate to what my patterns are,” Duncan says. “This book encapsulates my relationship to time but offers you the chance to see it through yours.”
Poems is available for purchase through Deadbeat Club Press
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