Apparently this video has been viral for the last four years, so I guess I'm just really not up to speed. Apologies if everyone has already seen this, but I just recently discovered it and liked it a lot. It obviously took a lot of dedication to keep it up over 6 years (actually he's still doing it, so it's been more like 11 years now). There are a lot of other time lapse videos out there, some started before his and longer lasting, but somehow his struck more of a chord. It might be his eyes--very melancholic eyes that seem to stare into your soul. It might be the music, composed by Carly Comando. I don't know for sure, but I do know it's more than the sum of its parts. And there are a lot of parts. Enjoy.
One of the things I liked about Noah Kalina's project more than others is that the background constantly changes. There are repeats of course, and it's mostly indoor, bedroom scenes--but angles change, lighting changes, rooms change, life happens. A lot of other people chose to photograph themselves against an unchanging background, often a white wall. I think it is supposed to highlight the changes in them over the years--everything from face structure and hair loss for the really long-lasting ones to the trivial--hairstyles, fashion, glasses, zits. I guess this is the idea with time lapse projects. What I liked about Noah's was that it seemed to flip this around--everything around him changes; in fact, because of slightly shifting photo centers and some being a bit closer than others, and in no small part due to his wild hair, he appears to be spinning around and around in a wheel of time, a Billy Pilgrim for a new generation of disenchanted skeptics and soul-searchers. Everything around him rapidly becomes a blur; he is the one constant.
And I feel that for that reason, combined with the haunting music and his large, sad eyes, his becomes less of an artsy, "neat-o" project, and more of an intimate connection with another human being. Do we know him? No. Can we gather from the blur of self-portraits flashing before us in rapid succession what he has gone through in those six years, what joys, what depths of despair, what losses, what happinesses, what events--from the mundane to the life-shatteringly transcendent? Of course not, barely more than he can gather of our lives from looking mournfully back at us. But we want to know, we yearn to make a connection with this fellow traveller on Earth, one whose art reminds us of how fleeting, how ephemeral life is. Six years condensed to five minutes. A life condensed to photos.
So it goes.
"And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one." -- Hebrews 11:13-16
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