Archaeology in Motion

Since coming to Larnaka almost 10 years ago, I’ve been fascinated by the traffic patterns in an intersection immediately outside our hotel.

It’s a kind of a four way intersection, but there are no traffic signals or marks on the road to give drivers an indication of where to position their cars to make their plans understood. Combined with the challenge of driving on the left side of the road, this intersection can be terrifying to the novice American driver in Cyprus.  In the past, when the traffic was particular chaotic, I’ve had experienced drivers simply despair and abandon their cars wedged in some precarious position and pinned there by the relentless flow of traffic.

I’ve tried to photograph this intersection in the past with almost no luck. There is simply no way to document the swirling maelstrom (or elegant dance) of cars, pedestrians, scooters, motorbikes, busses and trucks as they flow through this space.  I am sure that the patterns of activity have left marks, but even these marks do not capture the movement itself. With photography, we can produce the blurred motion of cars through the intersection during the day, and this gets us halfway to capturing real motion in a static space.  The smudges of color captured during a 1 second exposure on an overcast day are indecipherable except as moving vehicles.

It is at night, when I can set set the exposure to 30 seconds, that the intersection begins to come to life.  The contrails left by the cars bring to life the array of patterns possible through the intersect. The photo below is a combination of 7 – 30 second exposures (or about 3:30 of activity).

UPDATE: You can compare this to a video shot by my collaborator Scott Moore who has moved his blog here. Click through for Scott Moore awesomeness.