Excerpt 1:25 minutes with sound.
Wiseton Video 27min. 2005 / Edition of 7
This video is intended to enhance the still photographic works, expressing in real time something of the pace at which life in a small town proceeds.
Small Town Streets
Photographer Danny Singer has, since 1999, been creating large-scale images depicting small, prairie town main streets located in both Canada and the United States.
Many of these towns are only a stone's throw from major highways, and are often missed by the passing busy interurban traveller.
Singer was struck by the concise, linear nature of these matured rural front streets, which still manage to suggest possibilities for renewal, reinvention and growth. They contain all essential elements that define the historical Town, constructed within a very human-scaled and efficient space. Industrial and suburban sprawl are of another world.
These exquisite works luxuriate in the myriad surfaces, textures and clarified space of North American small town main streets, and beautifully capture their fascinating nuances of light and place.
Production for the Streets
Danny Singer constructs these works by carefully stitching together many individual exposures with digital editing software. The resulting composition emerges as an all-inclusive, seamless prospect which has a unique "floating-point" perspective. These lyrical works — which can be as much as 10 feet in length — exemplify Singer's inspired and meticulous integration of photography with digital process.
"[The small town main street] is a social, cultural and commercial gathering place … with its constituents of community hall, bank, restaurant, bar, curling rink, post office, hair salon and hotel … Singer's main streets evidence a present caught between familiar ways of life and uncertain prospects."
— George Moppett, Associate Curator of the Mendel Art Gallery