Photography and Time make good bedfellows, and photographers have long explored the means to marry them. To record the passage of an hour in a single frame is particularly ambitious. When Hiroshi Sugimoto sought to record an entire movie onto one negative in his Theaters, a few hours of projected light became a completely white screen. In About an Hour, Pelle Cass presents the same amount of time in astonishingly legible narrative scenes.

Dartmouth Softball displays bats gripped in the athletes’ hands at the plate, bats flying to the ground, multiple pitchers, runners on first, runners coming home… all in the same frame. For a sport that usually unfolds at a measured pace, this compression of time is exciting. The entire story of the game is offered in one frame. Cass playfully disrupts the photographic fixation of capturing a single decisive moment by packing his images full of as many as possible.

Cass’s images spark a specific type of delight; a cheekiness that comes from observing ourselves from an outside perspective. Like kittens, we humans run in circles and chase balls. There is a spellbinding moment on a plane right before rising above the clouds, when you can look back down at our habitat as if it were a dollhouse. Our ways begin to resemble those of little ants or worker bees, carving our habits and behaviors into diagrams on the landscape. Zoomed out, we gain a new perspective on the patterns we create. Cass widens the view in a similar way, charting our forms with the compression of time.

View more work and check out the book here.