Sam Taylor Wood : Five Revolutionary Seconds

Sam Taylor Wood: Five Revolutionary Seconds is basically a panoramic photograph taken using a 360-degree camera. It turns and photographs the whole room, literally from one side to the other, without any distortion. And what I had within this one reasonably-sized room was about four or five different situations: somebody playing a grand piano, and there were two young very beautiful-looking boys, (men), and then further round there was somebody leaning in the doorway naked, and then two actors having a huge argument... And I also recorded the sound, so that when you hear the sound you hear the..

Marcelo Spinelli: The sound while you were panning?

STW: Yes. Whilst I was making the photograph. I mean, I took lots of shots, so I spent about half an hour and recorded all the sound of that half an hour. But the photograph itself literally took five seconds to take. So what would happen would be the guy would be just playing the piano, and people would be chatting, and the two actors would be just talking amongst themselves, about what jobs they were doing and what they had just done, but just as the camera went past them they would start screaming and shouting at each other. And then, as it had gone past them, then they would start talking again.

MS: And that's more or less what marks the moment of the photograph: the argument, because that is the only recognisable sound in the image.

STW: And also the piano playing.

MS: But is the piano is playing throughout or just when it comes to him?

STW: Not throughout, but you're aware that it's him because he's kind of tinkering and then it goes into a bit of good...

MS: But I mean the argument is the actual moment when you recognize, when you know that that was when the photograph was taken, whereas the rest is the before and the after.

STW: Exactly, so it punctuates it. So I play the music with it as well, so that while you are looking at and you hear it as background noise, you don't really notice it - it is played at quite a low level.

MS: And you sort of read it, I mean you always read photographs, but here you walk along like that, don't you?

STW: Yes. It's actually printed so that it's nearly eight metres long, so it's quite massive. The negative is such strange dimensions; it's two inches by twenty inches...

MS: I was wondering if this relates back to what you were telling me before all that story about when you were working in these different places and finding this conflict between what you were doing separately - you know, what you wanted to do as an artist and thinking I'm doing these kind of dull jobs, or they turned out to be really exciting jobs, but they were not really what you were meant to be doing. And then you thought, well, this is actually my lived experience and I was trying to cut it off. And this relates back to what we were saying before, in terms of making explicit those moments which..

STW: Yeah, yeah. I mean with that photograph, I really wanted to project almost different states of being within one room. And also the idea of having the photograph all in one room is like creating a stage in a sense, so you've got these mini-theatres going on within this environment. For instance, the guy playing the piano in a very sort of thoughtful manner, and these two boys relaxing in a semi-bored way, and then the idea of a bit of eroticism in the corner: having this guy just standing naked, looking erotic. And then the passion of two people having a big argument. Having those different states of being within one environment: you know, having that all played out.

MS: A sort of life time thing?

STW: Yes, but also housing all of that within one photograph. Almost literally having that played out in different sections.