Longest of lenses
Tim Dunk took a photograph of a person in each of the 50 American states on the same day – all without leaving his Leeds home. Catherine Scott reports.
IT was while FaceTiming his eightyear-old daughter at the start of lockdown that Leeds photographer Tim Dunk got an idea that would change the way he worked forever. “I was on FaceTime to Nelly when she started messing about. I asked her what she was doing and she said she was pressing a button which took a photograph of her on FaceTime. I didn’t think much about it until much later and even now I am bowled over by what has happened since.”
With the world Zooming and FaceTiming as the only way of connecting, Tim, whose work as wedding photographer had stopped overnight, thought doing photoshoots with his friends via their iPhones would be a nice thing to do. “People were really keen on the idea, many said it gave them a reason to dress up and even in some cases get dressed. I thought it was just a fun thing to do – it just grew from there, it just took off,” says Tim, a self-taught photographer who used to work behind the scenes at Opera North until he picked up a camera, an unwanted gift for his partner, and never looked back.
He downloaded Shutter App which allowed him to take control of the other person’s camera. “It is all about light for me and so I get people to give me a 360-degree view of their home until I find the light I like and then I get them to get a tin of baked beans and a hair bobble and attach their phone to it and then I take the shot – everyone had a hair bobble and a tin of beans during lockdown. You wouldn’t believe the results.
“I've shot in lounges and wardrobes and polytunnels, allotments and staircases. Props were pulled from shelves and cupboards, or cat beds and cribs. I've shot people living within shouting distance, and stayed up way past my bedtime shooting people on the other side of the world.
“The shoots were fast and fun, locked into a short time frame and a similar visual language. They involved couples, individuals, children and pets. All of us in the same situations, all of us shut away.
“At any time this would have been fun as a creative exercise and way of finding a new way of making portraits. But in this bizarre time we found ourselves in, outside of our normal experience or comprehension, it made total sense that we made pictures in a new way too. The fact that it sparked such enthusiasm in people, resonated with them at a time where we are distanced from each other, from the world, is just lovely as a human being. These images feel like tiny threads from one home to the next, waiting to be pulled again.”
Unlike a normal photoshoot where people go along to a studio, all these images were taken in people’s own homes and so they were much more relaxed. Tim quickly saw the potential, and even since the end of lockdown he has not gone back to wedding photography, instead concentrating on remote photoshoots.
“It means I can take photographs of people around the world, in their own homes or offices, without leaving Leeds. It saves money and the cost to the environment.”
Tim has found that companies are also keen to employ his skills, with staff scattered around the country and other parts of the world. He then got the idea of taking a remote photograph of one person in each of the 50 states in America in their own home all in one day.
“Over the last three years I have got to grips with the technique and the technology having taken hundreds and hundreds of photographs this way. I wanted to push myself and I just wanted to see how far it could go and to demonstrate its potential,” says Tim, who ironically has never set foot in America.
He put a call out over social media in a bid to recruit 50 people from the 50 US states to take part in his world-first experiment.
"In a photography world where the conversation is dominated by the fear of AI imagery making photography, and photographers, redundant, this was an attempt to demonstrate the thing the robots can’t replicate – human to human connection,” adds Tim. “Every participant was a friend of a friend, or a friend of a friend of a friend. In a gloriously frantic 13-hour period, I connected with these people, spent three to 10 minutes with them, and recorded our connection with a photograph.
“As someone who’s never set foot on American soil, I’m completely in awe of the fact I was able to spend time with someone in every single state in a day, and I’m so very