I have a problem with it, besides the obvious (partially). Making images about time is one of those things that can get so blatant, so superficial that your viewing public (and your own imagination) packs up and goes to watch telly instead. It’s not like I’ve cracked it, you understand, I’m just thinking it through.
There has to be something more that just the equipment of measuring time involved, something which implies or suggests something more – like f/1.4’s image below. The measuring equipment isn’t just measuring equipment, it’s a forgotten remnant of a past age, buried in the snow of God knows how many winters. There’s ‘immediate’ time, seasonal time, eras. Audience gripped, concept established fully.
And it’s pinhole; just the most basic of physics, light and the time the energy takes to register on whatever surface you have. Anything from a few seconds to six months – technology and symbolism combined. This one took two months http://www.flickr.com/photos/sengstrom/234995738/ and this one six months (and more detail) http://www2.uiah.fi/~ttrygg/project.html …and for these images, the measuring equipment has gone. Is that like portraits without the person actually in them?
When I posted this long ago, someone said they felt that pinhole cams play with time, and made recent past look nostalgically like revered past. They implied that the technology does this, rather than the length of time itself. This is different again from recording the passage of time; it’s placing it in a context, which might be nothing to do with the actual time it was taken. f/1.4’s image seems to me to cover recent eras, but set in the future, and although it’s pinhole it doesn’t suggest distant past, which is in keeping with the meaning entirely (as I read it anyway). But unless he has a handy time machine which he is about to patent and become a squillionnaire, I’d say that’s not really the case. It’s carefully set up, carefully positioned.
For depicting time:
You can change technology to add visual context, and through that you can place your image in time and add personal context.
You can cover personal context by splicing yourself with an image of ‘personal distant memory’, using ancient looking and distorted pinhole technology (I saw it here http://flickr.com/photos/25667683@N04/2413886771/ ).
You can risk making it more obscure by removing some of the most familiar cues to the subject (clockfaces) or by making the image less familiar – less straightforward, more distorted and unsettled.
You can try and link short actual time to longer perceptions of time – a personal second seeming to last an hour.
Buildings. People moving and leaving ghostly images (though it’s been done, need something new). Countryside without buildings visible? A bit too empty.
More to come.
Hmmm, there’s lots of interesting stuff going on here, let me see if I can add anything coherent…
I suppose in a way I never think about the process of photography as being separate from recording time, at its base I always think of photography as stemming from memory and recording; but on the other hand I suspect this is very much a photographers way of thinking about it, lost in a stack of images the power and passage of time is overwhelming.
So I like what you’re saying about pinhole photography as a process that takes time, and therefore places a short moment (seconds, minutes) in context without the photograph explicitly being about time – if I read your comments correctly of course. Do you know Heyoka/Katie Cooke? Her pinhole self-portraits are very much immersed in a sense of time, as well as the other (coincidental) aspect you mention of the image looking out of time or from some other era (I’m searching for a word here but can’t quite…) whether that be past or future.
I’m going to think about this some more…
Comment by monkeyinfez — July 29, 2008 @ 9:47 pm
It seems that most of the images I like are about time somewhere and somehow. I certainly find it about memory inherently also. That combination of time passing and what happens to the memory of events in that period, is fascinating – and as you said elsewhere, with pinhole ‘you do get the sense of the long exposure giving an image which matches the memory of the glimpse of whatever it was you thought you saw’. Technology matching purpose.
The whole basic physics thing of pinhole seems more akin to the slow but insistent passage of time than any more sophisticated process which bends it through lenses I guess, even though for a lot of cams (the earlier film ones in particular) I know there isn’t much in it. Can’t remember where I read it (might have been your stuff even) but someone compared time passing in a stream of seconds like the drips of water that eventually wear out tremendous holes in rock, or deposit stalagtites on ceilings, and that seems such a slow, gradual, regular process.
All well and good until the mind changes the rate of it, loops it around, removes the origional events in that process until they now only exist if people remember them. But then it’s the ‘If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it does it make a sound?’ debate again to an extent – that covers the event, but the experience of the event is what’s vulnerable and changeable.
I’m doubtless repeating myself but hopefully making sense. I do indeed like the way this character of pinhole can add another dimension to any image which is specifically about time also, a difference again, was well as the way you can try and record the inner experience of an event more with it. I do know Heyoka’s stream and will have to check out hers and yours too, it looks very interesting indeed.
Comment by caren80 — August 2, 2008 @ 10:25 am