Photography, Temporality, and Modernity

Time Warped

Kris Belden-Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351004244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte

This book examines the photography's unique capacity to represent time with a degree of elasticity and abstraction. Part object-study, part cultural/philosophical history, it examines the medium's ability to capture and sometimes "defy" time, while also traveling as objects across time-and-space nexuses. The book features studies of understudied, widespread, practices: studio portraiture, motion studies, panoramas, racing photo finishes, composite college class pictures, planetary photography, digital montages, and extended-exposure images. A closer look at these images and their unique cultural/historical contexts reveals photography to be a unique medium for expressing changing perceptions of time, and the anxiety its passage provokes.

1 Photography and Time

Many theorists, historians, and commentators have noted that photography has a distinctive and complex manner of representing temporality. Roland Barthes, for example, wrote that the photograph has a peculiar capacity to represent the past in the present, and thus to imply the passing of time in general.¹ As a consequence, Barthes argued, all photographs speak of the inevitability of our own death in the future. Moreover, he linked photography’s peculiar, tense-confounding temporality to its capacity for a certain kind of realism: “false on the level of perception, true on the level of time.”² Barthes’s analysis poses a challenge to later commentators on photography to explore these questions about the medium: What exactly is photography’s complex, multifarious relationship to time? How might it express and reflect the human condition in the ages of technological modernity and postmodernity?

This book addresses those queries by analyzing in detail a sample of understudied, mass-accessible, commonplace vernacular photographic practices, positioned within the temporal mindsets of their respective cultures, and considered as expressions of their own shifting contexts. Rather than provide a comprehensive, and necessarily incomplete, study of every possible way in which photography may express time, this study instead focuses on in-depth analyses of specific photographic practices, including stroboscopic images, fin-de-siècle family studio portraiture, racing photo finishes, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) whole-Earth, digital-composite images. It will be argued that each of these photographic practices represents time, as it is filtered through their respective, unique temporal cultures, in at least three distinct ways: as atomized time, narrative time, elapsed/“sculptural” time, and as synthetic/hypothetical time. Each chapter offers localized historical views of those photographic practices and their contexts, in an effort to explore the evolving cultures of temporality that gave form to those photographic practices.

Specifically, Chapter 2 will begin by taking a closer look at the temporal climate into which photography was born. It will examine early written accounts and photographs by several pioneers of the medium, including William Henry Fox Talbot, and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, whose work – along with then-popular Romantic literature and painting, and the development of photographic technology – helps to establish an “atomized” view of a fraction-of-a-second, full-field of space as the way by which photography strove to convey time. This approach consequently also became a dominant narrative thread in our histories of the medium. The founders and the earliest commentators on photography noted the medium’s peculiar capacity to capture a thin slice of time, and they noted that photography’s unique views differed dramatically from the appearance of known reality, in which time’s relentless passage is non-negotiable. For the “lived” experience of time does not halt, slow, or enable itself to be reversed, revisited, or re-lived for the sake of playing through different consequences.

Yet a closer look at Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic work produced at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – which represents an apex achievement of the “atomized” visual slice of photographic time by capturing 1,000,000th-of-a-second durations – reveals such views to be far more temporally complex and multifarious than they may at first appear. When Edgerton’s Death of a Light Bulb series is examined in relationship to Barthes’s systems of “relay” and diegesis to describe the production of narratives in visual culture, even the most “instantaneous” of “atomized” photographic views, born at the hands of an electrical engineer at MIT, is riddled with ambiguities.

To further study the role of narrativity in temporalizing photographs that is introduced in Chapter 2, the chapter that follows will examine the complex experiences of time offered by a fin-de-siècle, studio-made, family portrait from the Oklahoma territory. This commonplace, straightforward, vernacular photographic practice is often overlooked in our histories, despite its ubiquity and complexity as a visual form. In Chapter 3, a specific family portrait, the Leighton Family (1899), is compared to a poem about the making of the photograph written many years later by one of its subjects, Nancy Ellen Miller, who was just six years old at the time the portrait was made. The image’s connection to broader historical narratives, such as the settling of the Oklahoma frontier and the Dalton Gang of outlaws (the Leightons’ frontier neighbors), is explored and positioned in relation to unpublished poems by Miller. In addition, the Leighton Family is contextualized with respect to the unique challenges posed to the cohesivity of the family unit by the mobility encouraged by the first railroad lines – which themselves reconfigured conceptions of space and time.

When compared to a Xeroxed, “updated” version of the Leighton Family portrait, made by Billie Hazel Leighton Flora to include a sibling who had not yet been born (her father, William Orman Leighton), additional, fluid temporal associations emerge. The “narrative times” evoked by portraits such as the Leighton Family operate in the realm of the subjective, in order to aid in the building and maintenance of personal memories and histories. Such stories, like the human experience itself, are amalgamations comprised of conflicting temporalities, built upon the surprisingly steady, yet essentially flawed, faculty of memory, tinged with optimism, nostalgia, and hope for the future. The Leighton Family, it is argued, offers viewers non-linear, multiple temporal vacillations between past, present, and future tenses (and combinations of these). This exemplary portrait has a complicated, unfixed, and potentially endless number of ways to relate to temporality that far exceed Barthes’s conception of future-anterior time.

Chapter 4 explores another possible relationship of photography to temporality, through a case study of the unique manipulations of time and reality found in racing photo-finish images. A photo finish depicts objects moving past a fixed vertical strip of space (the finish line) over time, using a moving strip of film which moves inside of a shutter-free camera at the estimated speed of the racing objects. In a photo finish, the usual expectation – that a photograph will reveal spatial relations at a given instant of time – is reversed. Instead, the resulting photograph depicts only moving objects as they pass a fixed location, in a vertical strip of recording field, over elapsed time. Photo finishes are regarded in a court of law as absolutely truthful to the order of race finishes. Yet the images are full of visual departures from known reality. This chapter will discuss the photo finish’s complicated relationship to time, space, and “truthfulness.” Acceptance of the photo finish’s blending of realism with abstraction will be examined as a product of a mix of an enthusiasm for the rationalizing, positivist quest to explain the world, and an acknowledgement of the limits of its comprehension by humanity. Both of these urges will be discussed as necessary components of modernity’s cycle of innovation, as knowledge of the parameters of our understanding of the universe is the very fuel that drives further technological advance.

In Chapter 5, an examination of the temporal complexities of the NASA’s whole-Earth composite photographs shifts the conversation to include today’s digital image-making practices. NASA’s Big Blue Marble Next Generation images are made with the aid of software which blends photographs from many satellite images to produce a picture of what the Earth might look like if there were, for example, no clouds, and if the planet were bathed in full sunlight. Although these images are regarded as truthful scientific inscriptions and rarely are questioned, these whole-Earth photographs are the result of the seamless digital combination of separate photographs, all of which relate to different moments in time. What we see in them is a complex synthesis of fractured time, collapsed space, and simultaneity of vision. As Geoffrey Batchen has suggested, digital images are “in time but not of time.”³ These unique composite temporal abstractions are products of an anxious culture coming to grips with a quickening pace of life, a quickening facilitated by computer technology – the very tool used to compose these images. But they also share in photography’s history as a medium for making data visualizations that test the expectations of documentary veracity often monolithically associated with photography.

This book self-consciously examines a selection of understudied, yet commonplace, photographic practices that appear in our homes, on the pages of our newspapers and magazines, at race tracks, the Tour de France, and at the Olympic Games, and in our textbooks. Though arguably unextraordinary, these images have a formative influence on our knowledge of the world and our sense of family identity. They are part of our human temporal habitat. By selecting these objects whose stories have not yet been told, this project contributes to the expanded discussion of the diverse field of the “photographic,” while also undertaking the task of investigating a few of the medium’s many and varied articulations of time.

The Multifariousness of Photographic Time

Despite the importance of the fluid expressions of time by the medium of photography, an expanded study of temporality, and its genesis in specific, distributed photographic micro-cultures, has not been undertaken in our existing scholarship. The bulk of the existing literature on photographic temporality and its cultural/intellectual genesis concentrates on the work of the pioneers of late 19th-century to early 20th-century motion studies. Notably, Marta Braun’s scholarship on Étienne-Jules Marey offers valuable biographical and scientific contexts for these early motion-study projects.⁴ Other scholars, including Philip Prodger, Rebecca Solnit, and François Dagognet, have offered similar biographical and contextual studies of Eadweard Muybridge.⁵ A recent book by an historian of science, Jimena Canales, also takes a closer look at Enlightenment scientists’ “tenth-of-a-second-minded” interests, and suggests that their work inspired Marey and Muybridge to capture the “microsecond.”⁶ While Canales’s study is written from the perspective of an historian of science, it represents an interdisciplinary approach to the history of photography that accounts for the medium’s connection to its own scientific and technological contexts. Even though the degree to which individual photographers such as Marey and Muybridge may or may not have been aware of such discourses is debatable, Canales’s work to illustrate the merits of further interdisciplinary views of photographic practices have influenced the conception of this book. As these scholars have shown, studying the role of the discursive climate that gave form to photography’s variegated expressions of facets of time, if localized to the image itself, holds much promise for illuminating and enriching our existing body of scholarly literature.

Given the wealth of scholarship on late 19th- to early 20th-century motion studies, photography is frequently discussed by scholars as offering a “stilled,” fraction-of-a-second-exposure, “instantaneous-time” image that comprises a constituent building block for cinema.⁷ As a result, many scholars have been content to articulate photography’s temporal dimensions – to use Solnit’s words – as the unique, “violent, abrupt, glorious” rupture offered by the instantaneous-time photograph.⁸ As Solnit explains, photography’s expression of a sliver of time is decidedly “modern,” and expresses the “sudden shock” of living in “a transformed world” in which the absolutism of time and space had been “annihilated.”⁹ Mary Ann Doane has suggested that this “shock” was further accentuated by the monetization of time itself as a thing of value.¹⁰ This shift was nothing short of revolutionary, and echoed then-contemporary, parallel scientific innovations in the fields of engineering and physics, as well in the new assembly lines suddenly appearing in full force in factories.

While acknowledging the important role of the late 19th-century photographic motion studies, this book complicates the assumed straightforward temporal expres...