Wow. Let me just
start somewhere, eh? In defense of
what’s above, but also in defense of letting oneself embrace the rambling
mind. Tangential threads – welcome! I don’t know if it’s the nature of secluded
time during an artist’s residency (certainly in part) or if it’s more to do
with this newfound freedom I’ve embraced, of yes, leaving the single image, for
one.
Now, this is not a new thought for me. I’ve known for some time that I was no longer
interested in the photographic “moment” per se.
And that gets back to my fixation on the instant, or instance (is
instance plural of instant? – an instance,
as encompassing a duration, but yet an instant occupies a duration as well, but
do we think of it as inherently being more brief, I wonder – and then what
about “moment” – for whatever reason that conjures within me a more lingering,
poetic passage of time, one “brief moment” could seem to endure for a painfully
long time, whereas we think of things being “over in an instant”). At any rate, you can see where the (my)
problem lies.
So I choose to work with multiple frames – generally those
that were captured (in time and in space) very close together. I’m certain this also has to do with a general
shift in subject matter over the years and also a different set of
preoccupations. I work fast/slow – both
methodically and stupidly. It’s always
in response to the world, but either that which has been sitting there for
quite a while, with minimal transformation other than seasonal/environmental
(landscape type spaces) or that which is in my immediate surround, also mainly
sitting there pretty quietly, aside from my random interventions – but mainly
it’s just me looking at a space, a corner, a slice, responding to something
that was prompted simply by virtue of perception. (I rambled off the next
paragraph and in the midst had to take a break to photograph the bedspread in
the sunlight, because I noticed something when I walked back to the desk from
fixing my tea – how many bedspreads in sunlight can I photograph? Apparently, quite a few. They’re all different, of course – maybe a
separate post on that later).
Right so, back to the single image chit-chat. I realize this is not a new notion –
photographers have certainly worked with multiples of similarity before and there
are many examples out there (Meatyard comes to mind quickly, with some of his
repetitive landscape abstractions), and there are even more examples with
contemporary work (yes, Uta Barth, I know – but many others as well) and I
suspect that more and more of this will become common. We are now very accustomed to a photographic
type or way of seeing, and many of us realize this does not necessarily attach
itself solely to one view of a subject from a fixed vantage point for a
predetermined fraction (or sometimes longer) of a second.
What we get from that type of representation (which can
certainly be remarkable) is a stable relic of sorts – or maybe even a
suggestion that eternity has been fixed in an instant (to paraphrase
Cartier-Bresson). But what has been
fixed, really? (And this is sort of hard
to get at in relation to a Cartier-Bresson quote, because I can understand his
perspective as a street photographer, thinking about the flux of humanity,
rapidly passing in front of his lens and indeed, isolating a solitary fragment
from the flow – fixing, perhaps, a bit of the optical unconscious.) But how then could we attach this idea to
images of landscape, or those that sit still – even a formal portrait,
perhaps? When time presents itself as
its own entity (part of the subject matter, or even as subject itself) the
single photograph confounds our expectations, operating differently in response
to subject matter that does not move than to that which can (possibly) be
captured or halted. The descriptive
qualities of the photographic image are mesmerizing, to be sure, and to be able
to fix our gaze for “an eternity” is
one thing – but to suggest that somehow an
instant has been captured is problematic.
There is duration. And there is
no saying where that duration starts, or where it ends. Hence, the filmic representation can only do
so much as well – always decontextualizing the world, that’s all any re-presentation
can do.
So there’s no solution to this through use of the multiple either
(thankfully). It’s simply another way of
drawing out this kind of photographic seeing in relation to, I suppose,
metaphysical questions of being and knowing.
I choose to emphasize the fragmentary nature of photographic depiction
by replicating and reiterating, thereby emphasizing the gaps within perception
in general. I’m still in love with the
notion of the transcendental photographer as suggested by Laruelle (in an earlier post) and also with Hollis Frampton’s notion of an “infinite cinema” – the camera
always having been running and will continue to run forever, we plunk out
little bits at a time – and also with Crary’s emphasis upon the inability to represent the temporal experience within
the camera obscura – all of this is jumbled around with my thinking about the
multiple, but more specifically about what we expect from or desire from the
camera, and the camera image.
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