43 Hours

The settings he chooses are swimming pools, capsule hotels, laundromats and the Tokyo underground. The common denominator is always excess: excess in the form of masses or in the form of accumulated loneliness. For the Plethora chapter titled 43 hours, he also produced a video where he focused his attention on city traffic.

LFI: Why did you decide to do the series in video format?

Julio Bittencourt: The series is made up of quite a number of photographs taken in cities. Following a certain amount of trial and error, I felt that the solitude present in the photos could also benefit from having the additional elements that come with video, such as sound and subtle movements. I’m essentially a photographer, but also believe that the pictures are not an end in themselves. A single image that meant something at one point, may have another meaning or be used in another way later on, or in a series; or, driven by future technologies we can’t even yet conceive, becomes something completely different.

When I look at your images, it seems like you’re standing just in front of the cars. How did you create the pictures?

In each of the cities, I was always driven around by a local, and I’d be in the back with a tripod and the windows closed, just waiting for something or nothing to happen. It took me quite a while to figure out how to shoot and make this work, but once I did, it was just a matter of patience.

Did you tell people afterwards that they had been photographed, or was it a completely secret mission?

There was no way to do so. I wish I could have. Although the images are silent, there were these massive cities full of people, cars and traffic all around them – it would be close to impossible to let people know somehow.

How many pictures did you take for this project, and how did you go about selecting which ones to include?

I can’t give an exact number, but certainly thousands. By deciding to shoot at night from inside a car with the windows closed, the light was generally minimal, so a lot of good images were lost because either the people, the traffic or the car I was in moved.
The edit of this series was similar to any other: it was about finding its own flow, sticking to a certain color palette, and moving from images with a little action to stiller ones.

Traffic has this fascinating effect on people, where we can go from being extremely stressed to contemplating something far away from where you’re standing; and part of the edit also tries to take the viewer from images with a little bit of action to more still, silent ones.