Time-Lapse Photography and Film

No open-access works for Time-Lapse Photography and Film are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About Time-Lapse Photography and Film

Time-lapse captures frames at set intervals, one a minute, say, or one a day, then plays them at normal speed so that growth, weather or construction unfolds rapidly. It answered the 19th-century wish to see what the eye misses. Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey had broken fast motion into sequences in the 1870s and 1880s; time-lapse reverses the idea by speeding up slow processes. In Britain F. Percy Smith's film The Birth of a Flower (1910) showed blooms opening in moments.

Film-makers and artists have since used the method to make time a material. Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982) races traffic, crowds and clouds to a Philip Glass score. Stephen Wilkes photographs a single view for a day or more and merges the frames into one image that moves from daylight to night. Look for blurred crowds, streaking lights and shadows sweeping across a scene.

The makers