Photographer Talk - Step by Step/Keeping Time
Sunday 27th November, Side Cinema, 3pm
Keeping Time (Amber Films, 57 mins, 1983)
A screening followed by a discussion with photographer Sirrka-Liisa Konttinen and filmmaker Peter Roberts, delving into the motivations for both the film and the exhibition/book Step by Step which grew out of it.
ABOUT STEP BY STEP/KEEPING TIME
In contemporary photographic practice, photography can refer to both still and moving images. The digital and technological revolution has been a defining development in the emergence of ‘multimedia’ that blurs the boundary between the two. However, practitioners are already moving away from the more traditional idea of the term “multimedia”, which signifies some combination of images, sound, graphics, and text to produce a story and thinking much more in terms of 'visual storytelling'.
Amber Film & Photography Collective has explored the possibilities of the photofilm since its early days, 1983's Keeping Time experimentally blending drama, documentary footage and still photographs in a continuous narrative of a young dancer’s life from the age of seven to seventeen. The project grew out of early frustrations as Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen attempted to capture the atmosphere of the dance school in straightforward documentary images. She stayed on after the filming to continue her photographic project, resulting in an exhibition called ‘Step by Step’ at Side Gallery in 1984 and a book of the work under the same name in 1987. Konttinen and Roberts will discuss the blurring of lines between documentary and fiction and their rationale for consistently preferring a long-term approach to making work.