New York Portrait, Chapter Two (1981)
By Peter Hutton
Peter Hutton’s ‘Boston Fire’ depicts the abstracted burning of a unidentified building and a group of fire-fighter’s futile attempts to drown out the blaze. Constructed as a series of stationary shots aimed at different parts of the fire, it begins by focussing on the endless plumes of smoke that the fire emits, then looking at the ruins of the building and the nameless and faceless men attempting to put out the fire. Each shot is separated by a short length of black footage, which works to construct the images into a progression of events, rather than letting a straight forward montage attempt to create a narrative out of the events, locations and people present. It begins with the an image of billowing smoke emerging from somewhere just below the frame of the camera, initiating a play between darkness and light and the continual transformation of the image between presence and absence. Because we don’t initially know the origin of the smoke clouds, we focus on the after-effects of this unidentified catastrophic event rather than the event itself, bringing the relationship between cause and effect and our human connection and implication in events to the foreground. The clouds…
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