Slow Cinema of a Clearing Mind + Leaving the Ground. Book & DVD 2019 / 1999

Slow Cinema of a Clearing Mind
The abstract, surreal and documentary photographs in Slow Cinema of a Clearing Mind present a visual story exploring boundaries of vision and thought. The photographs were primarily made with medium format and 4x5” film and images were created in camera.

Using the black box camera as a metaphor for the eye and mind Engelund presents a storyline that shows how vision and thought are malleable. The photos explore their edges of light and how our reality of light is at times, surreal even when it is “real” / “representational” / “objective documentary photography”. Slow Cinema reminds us that seeing and thinking are better composed with a skillful mindfulness, to see less shadow and more light.

Leaving the Ground
Street Preachers, airplanes and city lights at night flicker through a screen, that’s scratched and faded like an old subway window. This hand developed super 8 black and white film was shot in the streets of Oakland, Berkeley and Seattle in the late 1990s. Looking back at the film now, twenty years later for the re-release as a companion piece to the new art photo book Slow Cinema of a Clearing Mind, the film’s experimental story is something like, getting off a plane in an unknown rainy town with $20, looking at the sun and thinking of a black balloon floating peacefully into the night sky.

Enter the stories, the art photo narrative tone poem Slow Cinema of a Clearing Mind (2019) and the 20th anniversary release of the film Leaving the Ground (1999). Book and DVD by Jason Engelund.

DVD, black and white film 8 minutes.

Book, 5.5” x 8.5”
51 pages, 38 photographs
Saddle staple stitch
Signed by the artist