A Selective Focus

Artist Profile of Keith Loutit

by Jonathan M. Silver

Want to see your world for the first time?  Now you can.

The creator of the above video is Keith Loutit, a humble 35-year-old photographer and filmmaker.  Loutit prefers his art to speak for him, yet with so many questions left unanswered by his videos, he agreed to fill in the blanks for eGuiders.

To understand Loutit, know the following: when questioned about his background, he posited only this: “I have always used cameras to record my life and the things around me.”  This simple notion of personal craft suggests that Loutit’s work is an evolution.  Loutit presents what he sees, and while what he sees may not be different from our perception, his presentation is nothing short of extraordinary.

The video above, “Bathtub III,” is the third video in Loutit’s (not yet complete) twelve part “Little Sydney” project.  It features Loutit’s most often recorded images: boats, water, and people – but these subjects do not appear as we know them.  In Loutit’s videos, subjects look smaller, jerkier, and more beautiful.  Loutit suggests his art “helps people to see themselves through the eyes of a child, living in a toy city.”  His audience “hopefully regains some of the wonder experienced when visiting a place for the first time.”  There is an uncorrupted brilliance to a child’s gaze - Loutit attempts to give our adult eyes the open-mindedness of youth once again.  Five of Loutit’s videos are named “Bathtub,” suggesting that our world is nothing more than a child’s playground.

While our preconceived notions of our surroundings may require reevaluation after viewing Loutit’s work, those notions are integral to understanding Loutit’s art.  Loutit’s imagery, while reflecting a child's perception, is intellectually anything but elementary.  “The idea behind ‘Little Sydney’ is to shrink mankind down to a scale that is more representative of our actual position in the world.”  This philosophy suggests human perception’s limits.  In response to human perception’s inherent and unavoidable subjectivity, Loutit creates and provides a visual depiction of common surroundings not physically visible without technology and art. This omni-point of view might be controlled, but can also be shared.

The complex thought that Loutit’s work evokes would not be possible without the technique he continues to perfect – a brilliant combination of tilt-shift photography and time-lapse filmmaking.  “As the techniques I use are transformative, I choose to shoot daily life and popular events so that my audience, the people of Sydney, can detach themselves from their existing perceptions of a place and see themselves from the outside looking in.”  While anyone can capture images of boats, Loutit’s complex technical system works to reintroduce us to our own world.

To create these videos, Loutit photographed (not filmed) his subjects.  He uses a “selective focus created by tilting lenses off their usual plane of focus [which] simulates the large ‘out of focus’ areas that are common when photographing or viewing small things.”  The photographs, shot with a set interval, are placed in a sequence almost like frames of film.  As these sequences have fewer “frames” per moment than film, they have the effect of a time-lapse whereby the sequence moves faster than real time.  In regards to this process, Loutit states, “for each subject, whether it be boats, cars or people, I work to find the right recipe of speed, vantage, light direction and focus to support the illusion.  Each final short film involves shooting between 15,000 and 100,000 still photographs, with an average of 6,000 images used in a final production.”

Louit’s videos are, for the most part, documentary.  However, Loutit’s most popular short in his “Little Sydney” series, “Bathtub IV”, is partially a [contrived] narrative.  For Loutit, a narrative depiction of the world does not violate his dogma, as it still acts to reintroduce the world to his audience.  This video, in particular, may even be more effective in relaying Loutit’s message as its main storyline removes a character from his world, only to return him later.  At least philosophically, here life imitates art.

Currently, the view count of “Little Sydney” is just about even with the city's population (about 4.2 million) - that’s a lot of views considering he is just showing Sydney what’s in their backyard.  Loutit proves that our surroundings, no matter where we're from, merit a second look - especially if that look can be from seen from another perspective.

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