03 Frame academy

Play with time and multiple meanings

There’s more to panoramic photography than yet another long thin shot of Durdle Door. Danish photographer Andreas Olesen has won critical acclaim for his enigmatic ‘Superposition’ project, which he has been working on for nearly 12 years.

“It started when I was given an Olympus PEN D half-frame camera by a friend, and I began making panoramic landscape images with three-to-five frames per image,” he says.

“I was really attracted to the aesthetic of panoramas composed of several frames, and I had my first solo show in 2006 with those images. Then I started to think about the interesting aspects of the format over a single-frame image, and I realised that there was the perfect chance to play with ideas about time in photography, as well as expanding the scope of the image to include more frames. I bought an old PEN F half-frame SLR and an adaptor so I could use my Nikon lenses, which would give me the ability to construct much larger images.”

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* Andreas uses a film camera, but his multi-frame technique can work just as well with digital technology. * Andreas draws inspiration from the aesthetic of the negative. “The black images between the frames are the actual blank space between shots on the roll of film. Each image is titled with the amount of time there is between the different shots that make up the image.” Why not arrange your images on grids in Photoshop to see if you can achieve a similar effect? * This kind of fine-art project takes patience and perseverance. “It comes down to constantly honing your craft, and you need to get used to rejection too, especially when approaching galleries or image buyers.”