Charlie Fox
Some creative projects begin with a concept. Panochron began with an instinct.
In 2012, I found myself compelled to photograph faces, not for any reason I could fully articulate, but because the human face felt like the most honest and inexhaustible subject I could point a camera at. Emotion, identity, experience, time, everything that makes a person who they are is written there. I simply couldn’t stop looking.
What transformed that compulsion into Panochron was a single idea: to go back. To find the same people, years later, and photograph them again at the same extraordinary scale and resolution, and to keep doing so. In that moment of return, the project became something else entirely. It became about time.
Panochron is a long-term portrait project in which participants are photographed in meticulous detail, images rendered at more than 150 megapixels and printed at 44″ (1100mm), large enough that a viewer standing before them can see my camera’s lens reflected in the pupil. At this scale, a face becomes a landscape. The distance between subject and viewer collapses. You are not looking at a photograph; you are in the presence of a person.
Each participant is also invited to record a brief interview, including a message addressed to their younger self, and a message left for their future self. Over time, these conversations will meet. A person will one day sit with words they left themselves a decade ago, and the archive will become something no photograph alone could ever be: a dialogue across time.
The name Panochron is a portmanteau of Pan and Chronos: all of time. It is the project’s deepest ambition. Time is the one force none of us can negotiate with. It acts on every face equally, regardless of wealth, geography, or circumstance. Panochron does not try to arrest that process or flatter it away. It looks at it directly, with honesty and care, and asks us to do the same.
The project is now in its second decade, with a growing archive of participants, some of whom began as children and will transition into young adults. As the years accumulate, Panochron is quietly becoming something rare: a living document of human faces and human lives, built one return visit at a time.
It began as an inexplicable desire to photograph people. It is becoming, I hope, a record of what it means to move through time in a human face.
Panochron was founded in Christchurch, New Zealand. www.panochron.com