• If you are interested in the Time exposures 1989-1997 book (4.8 mb., 122 pages, 103 photos) please email me a request and I will send you the pdf file.
• Download the Samples 2003-08 book (700K, 39 pages).

I began shooting photographs when I came to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship in 1987. My initial work (Time Exposures 1989-1997) was inspired by my practice as a painter and my background in science and chemistry. Dissatisfied by the limited duration required to expose a photographic image I soon began searching for a technique that could integrate my sensibility as a painter with photography and began shooting time exposures. This technique involved opening the shutter of a large format camera in total darkness and exposing the subject with variously sized flash-lights and strobes that were used as light painting tools. Using this technique the negatives were exposes only in select areas where the subject had been painted with light. Figures and objects were repeated throughout the space to create a sense of time passage and animation. The duration of the exposures ranged from 2 minutes to 6 hours. This lighting technique enabled me to digress from the documentary stigma often associated with photography and move towards a more personal vision. It also allowed me to create images that would suggest a sense of time passage and motion.

The representation of time as an ever expanding and contracting physical entity is one of the central topics of this work and continues to be a focus of my current practice. The Time Exposure series was produced over the period of nine years and was inspired by personal life experiences (bathtubs) and a heightened awareness of the vulnerability and ephemeral nature of the human body. The figurative distortions and the dense claustrophobia and darkness in these images become a metaphor for psychological and mental states of being. The images are representations of the interior of the photographer's mind that becomes simultaneously the voyeur and the object of voyeurism. The camera lense is turned inwards upon the photographer’s world that becomes the subject (self-portraiture) and the object of representation. The dismembered or decapitated body parts and figurative aberrations in Time Exposures also references the work of all those artists who used the human body as a site of psychological and formal exploration (Kafka's Metamorphosis, Sartre's Nausea, Francis Bacon, Italian 16th century Mannerism, etc.).

Beginning in 1992-94 my work as a photographer and installation artist began to overlap for the creation of concept and process driven works that fluidly integrate a mixed media approach. Depending on the nature of the project I am working on my practice oscillates between shooting photographic images, video, constructing sculptural interfaces, projection rigs and the development of computer hardware/software. My current work takes the form of a series of photographs or digital stills and a multimedia installation. I use photography as a flexible tool to record my images (Samples), or to generate time-lapse sequences and animations that are compiled as multimedia software applications (cesb 2006 and cesb 2008). Stills are selected and edited to compile image series such as the cesb interface stills, the portraits, the panoramas, the travel strips and traveler series from the Cycles, Elements, and Spaces in Between project.

The unifying goal that ties my past and present work deals with the representation of time and space as a malleable and ever expanding/contracting physical entity. Our notion of time has oscillated from Isaac Newton's concepts of a space continuum and an "absolute, measurable time dimension," to Einstein's special relativity theory (1906) in which time becomes a malleable entity relative to motion, velocity and space. In the 1920' Quantum mechanics and later on Steve Hawking (A Brief History of Time) broadened our horizons to disclose the infinite mystery of the origins of our universe and life on our planet.

As a digital artist I consider myself far from being an expert in the field of physics and science. I am intrigued however by the principles that regulate the evolution of the universe and life.  I have made these topics a central focus of my work that attempts to bridge the relationship between art, philosophy, science and technology.

Roberto Bocci