The Whale Hunt
Jonathan Harris continues to explore the art of storytelling in his inimitable way with his latest project, The Whale Hunt. A photo-documentary work, Harris joined a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska (the northernmost settlement in the United States) to take part in a whale hunt, a thousand-year-old tradition that provides the community's annual food supply.
In an attempt to mimic the same automated data collection and visualization usually executed by computer scripts for his projects such as We Feel Fine, Harris documents the adventure by taking photos every five minutes (even using a chronometer while sleeping) and in times of high adrenaline, increasing the pace to match his heartbeat. Starting at the Newark airport and ending with the butchering of the second whale, Harris took a total of 3,124 photographs over the course of nine days.
The result is an impressive framework that elaborately tells a moment-to moment story of a whale hunt, taking Harris' personal experience and creatively translating it online for people to experience. Expertly documented and organized, it's an unbelievable glimpse into a community's traditional activity.
via Josh Spear
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