Around Zero Hour is a series of landscape pictures that focuses on the exploration of visual structure and how the world as seen can translate into a single image. It’s focusing the attention on the unintentional and how the simplicity of our everyday forms a relationship with its surrounding objects.
The work is representative of a small inland town in Spain called Campos. For the past few years, I have made many solo trips to this rural town, only vaguely aware of time or the process and often finding myself at one with my thoughts and intentions. Drawn to the local blond stone set against the open clear blue sky, there is an unsurprising sense of authenticity and nostalgia – it’s as if time has stopped and there is a wonderful secret to be told.
Both random and balanced, it’s experiencing the world at a particular time, in a particular place and lending it my attention. Everyday photos of the everyday world, these images are not trying to be beautiful, but instead convey a certain type of intrigue and curiosity of our forever changing behaviours and how we interact with nature.
Sarah Bell (b.1981, London) is a photographer currently based in The Netherlands. Her photography of urban and semi-urban spaces is about exploration of places and documenting architecture in connection with its social environment. The work is driven by human interaction with nature and using photography to question the everyday world and what seeing looks like – when time is silent, textures defined and the space that surrounds us independent from noise.
© Text and pictures by Sarah Bell
