Weathering Time

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

The uniform black and white self-portraits in this project record Floyd’s body from head to toe, as well as her environment and sometimes family and friends. If she fails to take a picture, she advances the film in her camera, so a blank image is recorded, creating a visual calendar. For the first thirty-six years, Floyd used a film camera and last year she began to shoot with digital. In the book, over 1200 images are presented in grid format. They are grouped into categories such as Mom, Dad, Shirts with Words, Good Hair, Pets (all), and Evolution of the Typewriter—charting both the constants and the changes in fashion, technology, society and culture, as well as the people in Floyd’s life.

‘It’s not just the body that changes: fashions and hairstyles evolve; pets come and go; typewriters, analog clocks, and telephones with cords disappear; and finally, film gives way to digital and the computer replaces the darkroom. While Weathering Time is a personal archive, and I am mining 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 underscore the cultural, technological, and physical changes that have occurred over the past thirty-eight years—from my youth to the dawn of my old age.’