Jonathan Harris tells the story of a traditional whale hunt by a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska in new ways. He documented the entire experience with a very slow stop-motion-film: a linear sequence of 3,214 images, taken at 5-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. But in moments of high adrenaline, this framerate/heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 8 frames per minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of his own heartbeat.

All imagery is presented in a very rich visual interface: Each photo comes with various meta-data like date, time, cadence (level of excitement), context (where it was taken), concepts (which ideas are represented) & cast (who is pictured). All the pictures can be displayed as a mosaic (all photos simultaneously), a timeline (a medical heartbeat graph whose magnitude at each point corresponds to the photographic frequency) or as a pinwheel (circular timeline).

thewhalehunt.org