HURRY UP AND WAIT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE VERY NATURE OF PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE PURLOINING OF TIME, of snatching random instants from the continuous flow of zillions of moment-drops that compromises the tidal surge of life. We sneak out tiny frozen bits from this flow and lock them in a box, making the moments stand for the totality. Even two-plus centuries into this process, it ought to still strike us as a supernatural act, a miracle.
Because it is.
And since we’re treating time as something we can steal pretty much at will, we can take it a step further, using our cameras to customize the nature of the theft. In freezing an instant, are we snatching a sample of something that was lived in “real” time, or an unreal distortion of it, or a combination of both? In tweaking what is already an illusion (an abstraction substituting for the actual thing), images like this become easy:
Technically, making a picture in which time travels at several speeds at once is pretty much a snap (sorry). The “still” elements are shot at f/16, insuring sharp detail in the people on the bench. The passers-by in the foreground, by comparison, are in constant motion, and, with an exposure of just over 1/10th of a second (which is still “fast” enough to freeze the sitters), they are nearly transparent, and might even vanish into pure blur, were the exposure over, say, a second or so. Thus, in one picture, there are two contrasting captures of the passing of time, or whatever we like to think of as time.
Moreover, when, without a camera, we view this scene in what we fancy as “real time”, picture after picture’s worth of information is refreshed for our eyes every second, making both foreground and background figures appear, of course, to be equally solid, or “moving at the same speed”. What’s the take-home? That our cameras do not see the same way that we do, which makes them a fit instrument to show things that we cannot see without a little manipulation and/or magic. So, when someone says that “photography takes time” they are more right than they know. It takes it, and then it frees it from its bonds. The results are variable. Unpredictable.
Miraculous.
thenormaleye 