A Picture is Always in The Past

”I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor”

These are Roland Barthes’s words used to describe his experience while looking at a photograph of Napoleon’s brother Jerome. In Camera Lucida the French critic and semiotician analyzed the photographic medium from its very core. The overall project of Barthes’ Camera Lucida, as stated by the theorist of media Kasia Houlihan, is to determine a new mode of observation and, ultimately, a new consciousness by way of Photography. While Barthes contribution to the theory of photography is a complex topic to address in a further article, let’s look at the quote above for now. We can notice that the act of viewing a photographic image, as put by Barthes, is in direct relation to the use of past tense. Capturing a scene is simply a representation of it, which means that it has to have existed already. A photograph, therefore, always pertains to the past.

The immediate subject

What is special about viewing a photograph, or a painting in contrast to many other art forms is the temporal aspect. The subject in a photograph or a painting can be generally seen in total at once. There is no process involved, no form that dictates in what order a picture is to be seen. With some images, there is a strong impact the moment you see the image – Roland Barthes defined the visual elements that have such power as punctum. However, that doesn’t mean you’ve discovered everything, but the work as a whole can leave an impression on you before you’ve had the chance to intellectually grasp it in its entirety.

Compared to a piece of music, a poem, or to a larger extent to a movie, a bidimensional artwork offers itself (its content) at the first glance. At least, it leaves that impression. Any other art forms involve more time to experience the work and to comprehend the author’s message. Neither a song nor a movie gives themselves without duration, as the perception of such work is a process that involves time to experience. They can’t compress the message into a single moment, or something that can be seen as a whole in an instant. One event follows the other, one note comes after the one before, and you can’t change the sequence without changing the meaning of it.

How long is a moment?

The famous You Press The Button, We Do The Rest slogan coined by George Eastman in 1888 transformed moments of the everyday life into past events witnessed not only by the photographer but also by the camera. Nowadays, to take a photograph is even easier than the owner of Kodak advertised it. However, is the process really that simple for a photographer?

What does the use of the shutter speed mean? Technically speaking, we’re reducing a timeframe to an instant. Indeed, we talk about capturing moments when pushing the shutter button, but how long is a moment? 1/400^th of a second? 1/25^th? What about 30 seconds exposures? That hardly is a moment, so what is actually happening and what changes with the use of different shutter speeds?

We’re transforming an event that is embedded in the flow of time, and we’re grabbing it out of there to visualize something that might have been invisible otherwise. There are famous photographs of events that would be much too fast to see with the naked eye, but also experiments such as Muybridge’s who dealt with the question of whether a horse’s hooves all leave the ground at any point (see image 1).

1. Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion, 1878

Image source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/The_Horse_in_Motion.jpg

Almost any digital camera owner knows that we prevent motion blur by choosing a shutter speed that is short enough. If the person holding the camera shakes and the image turns out blurry, that’s usually seen as amateurish. The subject’s motion is also frozen by the shutter speed. If you’re taking portraits, you generally don’t want the subject to be blurry. In analog times, the tolerance for camera shake was higher, but nowadays with the ISO speeds available, blur is not often used as a creative method.

Motion in an image

When choosing a shutter speed that is long enough, you can show motion in one image. Clouds moving in the sky, the movements of masses of people. Sometimes a very long shutter speed is what makes moving elements look still, as it overlays the motion with more motion to form a medium, such as with long exposure water images. In other situations, you can make small elements that are in motion disappear. If you take a very long exposure of a public place, the people in that frame cannot be portrayed. Alexey Titarenko is a photographer who has used that stylistic element extensively and I am also intrigued by the way it changes how we view what it means to “capture a moment”.

What I think is really important is that there is never a perfect shutter speed to use – the speed one chooses depends on the purpose and the creative message one is trying to bring across, as is so often the case in Art. In a following article, I will explore a series of case studies on modern and contemporary artists who made use of the long-exposure technique in a highly creative and conceptually driven fashion.

Further Reading:

https://www.academia.edu/25592635/The_Protean_Camera_Crystallizing_Time_and_Movement_in_the_Motion_Picture

https://www.academia.edu/25013568/Woman_in_Motion_A_Show_and_Explanation_of_Early_Digital_Computer_Photography_Before_Digital_Cameras

https://www.academia.edu/12204456/Bullet_Time_and_Cyclical_Time_the_eternal_moment_in_recent_photographic_practice

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/annotations/barthescamera.htm

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic520549.files/BarthesLate.pdf

http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/budgett/classes/art19/camlucid.html

https://www.amazon.com/Camera-Lucida-Reflections-Roland-Barthes/dp/0374532338