Bethe Bronson

Bethe Bronson is a mixed media artist, processes and concepts relevant to photography such as presence, absence, and the passage of time inform her work.  

 

Fascinated with exploring the passage of time and how the past and present influence one another I have begun to use long exposure pinhole photography to document places, experiences, and the presence, as well as absence of people.  An ongoing body of work I call "Duration" has been the result, the two pieces mentioned below are from this series.

 

When my youngest child left home for university this past Autumn our house was devoid of children for the first time in almost 35 years. I created a nine-week long exposure of her empty bedroom to document her absence. The resulting work is a still pinhole photograph, "Daughter's Room During Her First Term Away".

 

Throughout the duration of "Lockdown 1", I had a handmade pinhole camera outside my window. Every evening after sundown I took out that day's picture and replaced it with a fresh piece of photographic paper. My aim was to capture what the eye alone cannot perceive, the movement of time. Through a series of 24-hour exposures these images reveal the trail of the sun as it moves across the sky. "Day In, Day Out", the resulting time lapse video enables us to witness the passage of days, weeks, months, as the sun makes its way across the sky as it has always done, as if nothing has changed.