dan browne

june 2017

This month I finished a three-year long project, Palmerston Blvd., a work that is my most personal to date. Shooting with a DSLR and intervalometer, I recorded the changing conditions of the bay window in my apartment over the course of a year, producing a time-lapse of over 250,000 images. As a point of comparison, memento mori (2012), which incorporated the sum total of photographs I had taken at the time I made it, uses 128,000 images -- in other words, I took more photos of this window than the entirety of the rest of my work.  Unbeknownst to me upon starting the project as a series of photo sketches (which were posted to Instagram from 2013 to 2015), what I ended up crafting a portrait of was the domestic conditions of my son's first year of life, and our eventual growth beyond this apartment into a new home. For those who have seen Poem (2015), this is a complimentary piece.

Palmerston Blvd. is one of Toronto's oldest residential streets, the houses built largely in the first decade of the twentieth century on grand scales that have since been subdivided into rental units. Between Bloor St. and College St., it features large stone gates, a massive canopy of trees, and cast-iron street lamps of an original design that was common to North America in the 1920s -- a feature stripped from almost every other street in Toronto. You can read more about the street here, and even see the window from which the film was made directly below the pedestrian crossing sign in the second picture. We moved into the apartment in December of 2012 and left in April of 2015. 

I plan to write something with more extensive detail on this work in the near future, however for now I will just mention that it would not have been possible without the help of my partner, Kat. I also want to give special thanks and credit to filmmaker Andrew Kim, who acted as a camera assistant while I hosted him during his visit to Toronto for the Images Festival, helping me immensely by reloading the camera battery and memory card during the final continuous sequence that lasted for over a week. 

Still images from Palmerston Blvd. (2017), 14 minutes, 4K digital, silent.