Weathering Time

Nancy Floyd has been photographing herself since 1982, with the aim of taking one picture a day. The resulting project of over 2500 images is a meditation on the passage of time, loss and aging of the female body.Weathering Time is the winner of the ICP / GOST First Photo Book Award.

The uniform black and white self-portraits in this project depict Floyd’s body from head to toe, as well as her surroundings and sometimes her family and friends. If she fails to take a picture, she advances the film in her camera, so that a blank image is recorded, creating a visual calendar. For the first thirty-six years, Floyd used a film camera and last year she started shooting with digital. In the book, over 1,200 images are presented in a grid format. They are grouped into categories such as mum, dad, shirts with words, good hair, pets (all of them) and the evolution of the typewriter, describing both constants and changes in fashion, technology, society and culture, as well as people. In Floyd’s life.

“It’s not just the body that changes: fashions and hairstyles evolve; animals come and go; typewriters, analogue clocks and corded telephones disappear; and finally, film gives way to digital and the computer replaces the darkroom. Although Weathering Time is a personal archive and I exploit the archive to address issues of the female body, the family snapshot and loss, I am also interested in producing images that suggest some of the experiences of my generation. Indeed, the photographs highlight the cultural, technological and physical changes that have occurred over the last thirty-eight years – from my youth to the dawn of my old age. ”