A MOMENT IN TIME

A round-the-world trip in pictures through each of our planet’s 39 time zones.

After opening with a world map keyed to said zones (with explanations for that big jog in the mid-Pacific and the fact that several zones represent only 30-minute intervals) Hegbrook kicks off his tour at 6:00 a.m. with images of curlews and a Sally Lightfoot crab on Baker and Howland Islands. From there it’s on to a peaceful bay on Niue Island at 7:00, and so westward to scenes of coffee harvesters in Colombia (1:00 p.m.), pedestrians in London and lions in Nigeria (7:00 p.m.), constellations of lights in Hong Kong skyscrapers and the skies over Perth (2:00 a.m.), and finally back around to Fiji and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Done in a painterly style, the art varies city, rural, and nature settings in a range of sizes and viewpoints, thus staving off visual monotony as well as underscoring the diversity of activities going on at the same moment. Human figures are not individualized, but they are dressed in modern rather than stereotypically national clothing and—at least in most urban settings—exhibit a range of skin colors. There’s no narrative beyond captions specifying each scene’s location and, at the very end, brief notes tied to thumbnails that identify the wildlife or activity on view. In a cute ploy that suggests the journey’s circularity and encourages viewers to begin at a random opening, the volume is split into three parts that are separated by hard covers bound zigzag fashion.

A sumptuous take on the perspective-broadening notion of simultaneity in an attention-grabbing format.