Slow Photography # 53 About TIME !
by Jim Austin Jimages
Having no alternative, the Florida sun was shining above us. As we sweated under it, in line for the art museum, my neighbor in the queue asked “Do you have the time?”
BACK IN TIME
The question seemed to hang in the air like a basketball player making a shot.
I answered" Yes,I do" just as the front doors of the Bass Museum opened into blissful air conditioning. Quickly glancing at my ancient Time piece, I told her the Time. It was 11:58 am, in Miami Beach or so it seemed.
We looked inside the doors, to where a museum security guard was glancing at his watch. He started to unlock the museum. A sense of déjà vu came over me. Perhaps it was just a glitch, as in The Matrix, but I wondered: Have I stood here before and told this woman the Time of day, just like this, at some Time in the past? What year was it, anyway?
It did not matter. Once inside, we traveled back to 1887, looking at a black and white photo series by Muybridge.
A 19th century photographer who was obsessed with Time, today Edward Muybridge is remembered as that guy who proved that all four of a horses hooves come up off the ground. His work is still fresh and vital. Looking at the people and animals he photographed, Time appears in the repetition of movement. We perceive time passing in the dialectic between a single still frame and the movement implied by a series of stills. His photography made us aware of events that, before he photographed them, were too rapid to perceive.
GETTING BEYOND TIME
Try to wake up, get going, and make it through your day without thinking about Time. It fills our minds, our work and we even try to manage it. Repeatedly, we obsess about Time because our brains have a built in clock. We are on time, over time, and in its nick.
We also celebrate it in music and song. Jones, Hansen and Bonham of the band Foreigner crooned about it with “Feels like the first Time.” In 1984, Cyndi Lauper recorded “Time after Time." Twenty years earlier, Bob Dylan first chorded “The Times They are A Changin'. "
The Times are always changing. Time is an obsession for photographers. Photography also changes the ways we perceive time. Walking into the Miami Florida Bass Museum, the set of prints on the left hand wall by Muybridge seemed beyond time.
For instance, using a bank of specially-designed cameras, some with 9
lenses, Muybridge sliced action into a series of stills.
Second, we tend to think that instant photography started with Edwin Land in the 1930's. Yet Muybridge started his famous "Animal Locomotion" series of stills in 1875, and was a pioneer in the instantaneous photography movement that lasted for decades. His lasting photographs, and those of many others like Harold "Doc" Edgerton and M. Maret, are beautiful mileposts along the instant photography highway.
INSIDE THE CLOCK: TIME IS ILLUSORY
Sing about it, or try to photograph it... from birth we are keepers of Time, and kept by it. Each one of us has a unique chronological autobiography. Yet, time is illusory. Like the Boreas wind, we are perceiving only its effects. We do not see Time itself. Holding our watches and reading precise numbers, we constantly reinforce the illusion that we can control Time's flow.
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| "Keeping Time" JIM AUSTIN JIMAGES |
Back in the Bass Museum in Miami Beach Florida, a clock made of plastic sells for $140. Its malleable design got me thinking of the flexible clock we have inside us.
Sometimes Time inside our minds drags quite slowly, and Time around us, “out there” just races past. At other times events outside us drag on, and our minds race at warp speed. Clearly, we have internal clocks in our brains and our cellular structures. These are always active. We perceive by these internal clocks. There effects impact our perception of Time, much more so than the short shutter speed durations of our camera dials.
We experience Time as a flexible flow, slowing down and speeding up. As we'll see, it even seems to freeze.
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| "Checking Big Ben" London May 21, 2005 at 4:25: 04 JIM AUSTIN JIMAGES |
FREEZING TIME
With our cameras and film and pixels, we think we are freezing time. Perhaps, we're just recoding spatial information that, like sea around a sandy shore, Time will erode. Some individuals, in their mind's eye, experience frozen time.
Certain people who have temporal lobe epilepsy, or who suffer from schizophrenia, are said to go through "time freezing." For awhile their perception slips, they experience time out of synch in blocks, almost as a continual still, unmoving present.
SLOW AND TIMELESS
Exploring Time's paradoxes is a part of being a photographer.
Our consciousness is self-winding. Accelerating our photography, we think in 0 to 60 mph terms. What if, instead, we let go of this frenetic pace? Well, we could change the pace and quality of our photography.
For instance, on our photo walks, we usually stroll along at 3 miles per hour. But what if we moved, instead, from 3 mph to stop, still, at 0 mph? As the band, The Eagles, advised in their song, we might “Learn to be Still." Being still, we might see, more deeply, living fully without fewer time references.
We've all made photographs that touch on the timeless. As we craft these photographs, they rarely come from using methods based on speed or convenience. The more effort-filled and emotional a photographic experience is, the more timeless it seems when we remember it.
As glimpses of timelessness grace your photographs, your prints become touchstones. They are not copies of objects, but stories that embody your emotions and intentions, and how it felt to make the exposure, develop it, and craft it. For instance, Muybridge invested days and months to make this series of images, sequenced here in animated form (click the play button):
CLICK PLAY Above: "Sallie Gardner at a Gallop", Palo Alto California 1878, a horse named Occident, each frame triggered by a tripwire. Copyright:Edward Muybridge.
TIME TO GO
As photographers, perhaps all we have is slices of Now. Pondering the facts of our future is guess work; we can not feel the future, nor touch it, hear it, see it or photograph it. So, to search for any Time but now is to chase a ghost.
The more we concentrate on speed, the more the pleasure of the scene we photograph seems to elude us. We do not need to rush. We do not even need faster gear to do better photography. What we truly want, spiritually, is to caress the Time we have. When we do, we enjoy our photography, eternally, as long as our sun continues to shine.
Thanks for your visit, I've enjoyed our time together, and when you read this blog, you are appreciated. Jim
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