The photograph is traditionally considered to be an image depicting a specific place at a specific time of day: what appeared in front of the camera’s lens at the moment the photographer chose to press down on their shutter. The photograph is inextricably tied to place, yet in the era of Photoshop where sweeping panoramic views of a site can be stitched together from multiple photographs, or entire worlds generated from a collection of pixels, the photographic image’s relationship to both place and time is far less certain. Practices such as geo-tagging attempt to re-assert the photograph’s relation to place, by fixing the photograph to a particular point on the Earth’s surface by a set of co-ordinates. Such practices, however, do not exhaust the potential for ‘data’ to furnish the photograph with an additional or altered connection to place.

In this paper I discuss my recent photographic artwork 'Glen Esk: Sunday 5th April 2015/Present Day', a depiction of a glen in the north east of Scotland which uses a feed of real-time weather data to change its framing depending on the direction the wind is blowing in the glen where the images were captured. By integrating this live data into the digital photograph, I argue the photograph takes on a new and anachronistic relationship to the site of its capture. The paper will detail both the process of creating 'Glen Esk' and its subsequent inclusion in a show of my recent artwork, during which a number of interviews were conducted with visitors to the exhibition. The viewers' varied responses to the work invite questions about the digital photograph’s relation to place, time, and how the integration of data might allow the photograph to depict more than a specific place at a specific time of day.