Lost in Light
Photographs by Gilles Goyette
Lost in Light was playing on the TV in my apartment during a party once, and a friend said, "When I first saw it, I thought, sure, photographs, whatever. Now I can't take my eyes of it." That's Gilles' style in so much of his work: self-effacing. (In Super Vox, the "I" is a vanishing one.) But it has the force of a tsunami behind it – a whole universe that offers a totally absorbing experience.
Gilles took about 150,000 photographs of one street corner over the course of year, from his 2nd-floor apartment window in the heart of Cabbagetown, Toronto. Like The Random Generated Text Project, technology made an experiment possible that would have been inconceivable before.
In this case, he curated the output by selecting 15,000 images as an archive, then whittled that down to 1,500 for the 35-minute "slide-show film" (as I call it), Lost in Light, with an accompanying soundtrack of street noises and ambient audio.
It was presented as an exhibition & installation at Gallery Arcturus (Deborah Harris, Artistic Director) as part of the 2015 Contact Festival, and selected by Toronto’s NOW Magazine as one of its “must-see show.”
A DVD/Blu-ray format is in development.
Lost in Light takes the still image, morphing over time, as the smallest unit of meaning from which to generate a larger story. But what exactly is the story? Is there a story? Is this even a film? A camera, anchored in one spot, frames a bit of space (the façade of a grocery store on Parliament Street); people walk in and out of frame – fast moving objects blur beyond recognition – day and night, through all seasons, and all weather conditions.