Marking time: Photography, Film and Temporalities of the image
Green looks at the work of Sugimoto, and how his work challenges photography’s “relationship to instantaneity and to the photographic image as the record of a brief and transitory moment in time.” (P9) In my work I wish to do the same. A photographic instant is never really an instant, it always takes place over some length of time, no matter how short that is. By using very long exposures we can draw attention to the relationship between the fixed image, and the time that passed during its creation. Sugimoto’s work is additionally interesting because of its link between the still and the moving image.
Green points out the way in which we are drawn to the polarised differences between still photography and film, which he believes are quite obvious, they are “intimately technologically and aesthetically connected yet ultimately ontologically distinct”. (p11) Photography is seen as the most truthful medium, which may, unlike painting present the world as it appears naturally, this is a similarity that film shares with it, being based on the same principles. What photography lacks however, is to display anything outside of the frame, while film is able to not only show multiple frames in time, but also in space, giving it closer “affinities” (p12) to how we see the world. I believe these two concepts could be crucial to my work, I can display the similarities and differences between the still and the moving image in ways which make it hard to separate the interconnected nature of the two, and disrupt the “affinities” either share with nature.
Photography can only record the past, the image will always be in the past. We can look at images long ago, and know that they are in the past, but when we compare these to modern images, do we always realise that they too are in the past, in a “ever-widening gap”(p13) between now and then. We must remember that the photographic image always grows older and it is a reminder of times passing in itself, time does not move in a photograph. This is another concept which I feel I can challenge in my work, with certain techniques I can challenge the ideas of past and present, causing differences in time in a single image.
Barthes discusses that a photograph is a reminder of death, just as I have outlined above. However, he also suggests that we try to make photographs more and more lifelike, in some futile attempt to deny our own aging and ultimately death. In a moving image this forces on the reader “the irreversible flow of linear time”(p15) which unlike a photograph forces us to follow time in a particular way. A single image is viewed for as little or as long as the viewer wishes, while the cinema must be watched at the pre-prescribed 24fps it is displayed at. My personal work could evade this, mixing the two formats and disrupting the conventions of frames and frame rates could allow time to flow in a non-linear way.
“No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction, it is the model.” (p15)