In the film Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster (script by the latter), Augustus "Auggie" Wren (Harvey Keitel), works at the Brooklyn Cigar Store and every day at eight am he takes pictures of his corner of Brooklyn (the corner at Third Street and Seventh Avenue), New York. He does not go on holiday nor anywhere because of his "hobby". Whenever he shows anyone his pictures, everyone says they are all the same ... and this makes him very angry since they are all, according to him, very different.
This project of mine is greatly inspired on him.
The intention of this project is to meditate on the endless metamorphoses of the landscape. It is a project on cycles. Cycles that tend to look the same and that physically they may even be very close but ... they are never the same.
This project is also an exercise on unrepeatability of the act of photographing. On ephemerality. It is a task that also calls for meditation on the passage of time (physical time, observational time, our time, the time of nature’s cycles), on the infinite differentiation and on the release of the changes in nature caused by the elements.
This work was developed between the first of January and the thirty first of December of a leap year. The pictures were taken over a period of three hundred and sixty-six days always from the same standpoint between eight and nine in the morning.
The work is also a tribute to every single "Auggie" of our time.
