Picture from window

This series of images was taken at 1845 Canyon Drive, the address of the apartment I lived in in Los Angeles, CA in 2009. It intrigued me so much that I decided to photograph it over a length of time that amounted to roughly six months. It was a need I had at the time, to follow the tree in a journalistic style of almost daily entry and log. Day after day the basic structure remained the same, and I was following a set of rules: maintain the same framing, maintain same aperture and capture the tree throughout the day time, from early morning until sunset. From the outset, this artistic activity seemed a banal, boring and repetitive recording, with no interesting outcome. It underlined my mood at the time, where I would spend long hours in my apartment, having no desire to go out or find a more adventurous subject matter. Some days, my role would be to simply maintain the mechanical recording of the set-up. However detached I could become in the process, a strange relationship developed between the camera, myself and the tree. The activity of experimenting with various speeds [over-exposures, under-exposures] lead to some aesthetically interesting results. On windy days, movement was captured with the rustle of the leaves, other days the film barely recorded anything, leaving a trace or a ghost of an image, hardly visible, next to nothing. The tree stood there, as a silent witness to my solitude during a time a time of recovery. It was an exercise intended to lead me out of my 'writer's block' and find a way to start working again. Then, as quietly as this activity came about, it altogether disappeared for me. All it has left are these photographs of exposure after of exposure of just one tree, like a notebook or rough draft. It has no intention of becoming anything else.