METER

	Dan Weaks
			ARTIST STATEMENT Dan Weeks' world journey began when he was only eighteen, photographing Ecuador's rural marketplaces in a project for the Peace Corps. Since then, he's traveled to fifty-five countries, whetting an insatiable appetite for history, architecture and anthropology. In the early '80s, Weeks embarked on photographing New York City's streets in panorama. "I thought, Wouldn't it be great to show space as it really exists, to observe all the fascinating details at once?" Weeks recounts. He gathered a crew, mounted a camera on top of a truck, and, inch-by-inch, photographed a thousand blocks of New York's midtown area. "I'm obsessive-compulsive," he explains happily. The images were spliced together by hand and rephotographed to create panoramas as long as seventy-eight inches. Years later, Weeks returned to the project, using a shutterless camera he built himself. The camera was again mounted on a car; aerial mapping film fed backwards through it at the car's rate of speed. The resulting cityscapes capture a New York City that is oddly distorted, as surreal as in dreams.