Photo District News features Doug Fogelson

Photo District News (PDN) recently interviewed F40 Director, Doug Fogelson, about his unique photographic process and his new book, The Time After. Read the interview and view the photo gallery on the website.


Human Nature: Doug Fogelson's Overlapping Exposure Process

“The planet must echo with our ghosts, and all the things we did and wanted still to do.”
—Eiren Caffall, from The Time After

Earlier this year photographer Doug Fogelson released The Time After, a book that considers humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world through an exploration of lifecycles and time signatures, which he visualizes using overlapping exposures created in-camera. His process yields complex images in which the subjects—people, urban architecture, street scenes, plant life, clouds, deserts and oceans, photographed in different locations around the world—intermingle and interact.

Fogelson worked with Tim Hartford to edit and design the book in a way that adds another layer of reference to Fogelson’s temporal and environmental themes: The book begins with multiple-exposure views of the sky and clouds, then turns to the urban environment before moving into the natural world, finally ascending back into the night sky, suggesting the passage of time—from day to night, from the birth to potential death of civilization. Environmental writer Derrick Jensen, writer and musician Eiren Caffall, and art historian Bridgette R. McCullough Alexander contributed texts that further explore the themes of humanity’s relationship with nature.

PDN recently spoke with Fogelson about his unique photographic process and how it helped him create what he calls a piece of “soft activism.”

PDN: The book’s title and its content suggest a reference to the fleeting existence of humanity. Is that the intention?

Doug Fogelson: It is. It’s about different time signatures; you’ve got seasonal time, cosmic time and human time, and then within each of the exposures, where they’re overlapped, you’ve got different time signatures as well. When I do the overlapping process it may take ten minutes to shoot one image or it may take an hour, where I’m waiting for traffic lights to change. It could be an intercontinental flight where I’m taking pictures out the window waiting for some interesting clouds to come by. There are different time signatures in the shots themselves. But I try to be really careful in lining up the shot; though there may be an hour in the image it all seems to be the same instant.

...Read the rest of the interview here.