Enigmatic Long-Exposure Photos of Films Captured in a Single Frame

By Alison Nastasi

May 14, 2016

Go to any New Age fair or woo-woo event and you’ll see aura photography — an electronic interpretation of what a person’s energy field or aura supposedly looks like. It’s usually an indistinguishable swirl of colors. Jason Shulman’s Photographs of Film series doesn’t look too dissimilar. He captures long-exposure photos of entire movies, creating a single frame full of colors and hazy forms. The Wizard of Oz is dominated by jewel tones, while Hitchcock’s Rear Window contains scratchy lines. In The Shining, we can barely make out gray windows and doors down a hallway, with what looks like trees peeking over the top of the frame. Shulman honed his craft by shooting long-exposure photos of athletes in motion. You can read about his process on Wired, which involves “a very, very high resolution monitor with a very big camera.” We prefer the images to remain shrouded in mystery. [Correction: It should be noted that the images are reminiscent of Kevin L. Ferguson’s film visualizations, which he started creating in 2013 and you can learn about on his Tumblr, Flickr, and Medium article.]