If you’ve been to the Albert Dock recently you might have noticed the 54 panoramic photographs that are placed discreetly along the railings, yet they still manage to entice everyone who passes by, pulling them in to what’s almost feels like people watching, as they are drawn deeper into the details of children playing in the sand. The exhibition called ‘Time and Tide’ was a labour of love for Liverpool born artist Lawrence George Giles who spent 5 - 6 hours at each location, taking more than 1000 photographs before returning to his studio to then spend over 2000 hours meticulously joining the images digitally. The result is 360 degree panoramic images that with a closer look reveal the passing of time, the same people in different positions and repetition of landscapes - maybe that’s the reason why so many people seemed to spend so much time captured by these works of art. I spoke to the artist Lawrence George Giles about his work, why he thinks pier’s are so important, and why they’re displayed in this way: What’s the work about? | "..I was really interested in taking the work back to a potential audience that maybe would not go to your normal, pristine, white cube space..." | | Artist, Lawrence George Giles. |
"Predominantly my work is about memory and that’s very true about this work which is called ‘Time and Tide’, basically in it’s simplest form the work is a series of 54 large scale photographic panoramas of all the remaining sea side pleasure piers around the coasts of England and Wales, I suppose more importantly for me however is that I believe these sites act as sites of early formative memory, so we’re taken to these sites generally as a child, by our parents or grandparents and we tend to revisit these sites over an extended period of time, possibly returning with our children or our children’s children." "I suppose another key factor of when we visit the seaside in general we tend to collect things - whether it be shells or stones, things washed ashore - and although we’re not aware of it at the time what we’re actually doing is collecting memories also to revisit the next time we return to that site, and that’s the intrinsic link back- for me, to photography." "We take a photograph not to view at that particular time, although that’s very achievable these days with LCD’s in the backs of cameras, however we tend to take a photograph to look at, at some time in the future. To me it’s also an act of faith in the future that we believe we’re going to be here at some later date, to actually go back review the times we’ve spent and that’s what I’m trying to capture in the work itself and I hope that when people view the works, that there’ll be something in at least one of the photographs that rekindles some of their memories and makes them think about what they did when they used to go to the sea side as a child, or if they used to go with people who may no longer be here to go with them again."
 | | The Artwork at the Docks |
"The work is about happy times, because the sea side is about bright sunny days, candyfloss, ice creams and fun generally, but there is an underlying sadness in the work as well because of the fact that eventually we’re going to go back to these places and the people who may have taken us in the first place may now longer be with us. For example as a child I’d be taken by my grandmother to Blackpool - specifically Blackpool North Pier has resonances for me, as and adult when she became quite frail it was me who used to take her so the role reversal there was quite interesting for me, and that to me really sums up where maybe the seed of the work came from for this body of work. To me it doesn’t really matter if you’re at Brighton or you’re at Blackpool you still do the same type of activities and the thing I like about it is barriers are broken as well, it doesn’t matter who you are when you’re at the seaside it becomes irrelevant it’s not important, and I think that’s quite an interesting fact also, that we’re all human at the end of the day - we all have aspirations, needs, memories, desires that sort of thing.†How have people received the work? "What tends to happen, is people come across the works and maybe initially they’ll walk past relatively slowly and they’ll take some sort of note of the work itself, and there’s some panoramas here where it’s quite easy to see that the people are reoccurring and doing different activities, what tends to happen when people pick up on that, they look a little bit more closely at that photograph, then they’ll start to return to the other ones and look for signs of that repetitiveness. That’s how it works there’s an in for people who are really interested in the more academic I suppose underpinning of the work, but it was always meant to work at least on a visual level which is important for me. It draws people in, and once they tend to pick on the basic theme of this reoccurrence they do tend to spend quite a bit of time with the work, especially when the work’s been out at the seaside, people have got more time then as well." Tell us about the laborious process of making the pieces.
 | | Copyright Lawrence George Giles 2003 |
"Each final panorama is made up of up to 250 separate, individual photographs and the process for capturing each photograph is quite simple you basically have a tripod and a camera, then you take one photograph move the camera 20 degrees you take 18 photographs and 18 x 20 you’ll get a full 360 degree panoramic. I was actually interested however in questioning our notions of what is a panorama, so everyone of the final Time and Tide images is more that 360 degrees, in other words not only do people reoccur - the landscape reoccurs as well." "The process itself is not anything unique - basically you get two photographs and you overlay them and very simply what you try to do is you zoom in and pixel by pixel you start to take the pixels out, so you’re either revealing the picture from behind or you’re omitting the picture in front. I suppose it’s attention to detail, it’s not that I’ve got a process that nobody could do it’s just that no body had ever tried to do it, and spent the 9,000 hours trying to perfect the process itself! It’s been 9,000 hours which equates to 24 hours a day for over a year, and that’s not including the taking of the photograph that’s just be sitting in front of a computer, you know burning my retinas basically - my eyes aren’t great after doing this project!" "There was a period of about 9 month prior to that when there were so many different processes that I’d tried, because it’s so difficult to blend in, well we’re sitting here today and the light’s changing as we’re talking, and at the seaside the clouds are moving, lighting’s changing, people are moving and the sea’s obviously flowing, so it’s not always possible. What I’ve had to do is - if you look at the sea rolling in, the sea itself might be made up of 30 or 40 separate photos of the sea going in and out, to make it fit together I have to use different parts to make it look like it’s natural, it’s just attention to detail really." Who’s influenced you’re work? "There’s a lot of video artists at the moment who very interested in the process of almost video becoming still, people like Bill Viola with his work The Passions, and Sam Taylor-Wood with Still Life and Douglas Gordon with 24 Hour Psycho, which is slowed down to a frame rate of one frame. At the same time as all these people are dealing with video which is basically a medium for capturing movement, I suppose I’m interested in using a medium - namely photography, which is supposed to be capturing an instant in time and extending that." "I like to think of my final works as narratives, they tell a story, they’re not just a sound bite, a snippet of time, there are plenty of photographers who have built up a reputation for taking a split second of time and reordering them and cropping them shall we say, in some way to force a reading of their own, what I’ve tried to do here is give a more natural feel to it, so if you ever look at any of the panoramics, nobody’s aware, everyone’s just carrying out their normal activities, they’re quite oblivious of me being there and I think that’s in some ways because of the amount of time I stayed at that site, rather than just walking in and taking a snap shot." Why have you decided to display the work outside?
 | | Copyright Lawrence George Giles 2003. |
"Especially because of the theme, I was really interested in taking the work back to a potential audience that maybe would not go to your normal, pristine, white cube space, so it felt natural I thought - where’s a place that a lot of people go to when they’re at the seaside? Well they go to the piers or they go onto the beach, so to either have them displayed along the promenade or actually along the piers themselves just made absolute sense." "The practicalities of getting the project together is a little bit more problematic, because obviously they’re outside, they’re unattended for over 2 months at each site, so there’s a lot of design behind them to make sure that they’re rigid and sturdy enough to last both the elements and other things." Has this work been displayed around the coasts of England and Wales too? "It launched in Brighton in 2003, and it was displayed for about ¾ mile actually, because there’s 54 photos so the exhibition itself can be as long as you want it to be, it depends how much space you’ve got. It then went to Blackpool in 2004, that was over a mile in Black pool because they’ed just revamped the promenade there. Later in 2004 it went to a place called Saltburn by the Sea which was the most North Easterly pleasure pier left around the coast of England and Wales, and it was really beautiful in Saltburn by the Sea because it was actually attached to the railings of the pier itself. The work’s always shown so it’s geographically correct, so if you walk down the right hand side you walk down the East side of the coast, and if you walk down the left you go down the West. So when you walk around the docks you’re actually walking around the coast of England. On the information panels there are maps with numbers, so it shows you where each one of these piers are because some people might not have heard of the less popular piers, places like Herne Bay which is a really sweet place." |
