IMAGE © ANGELA FARIS BELT, Bark Beetle Trails, North Carolina, 2008.

SHUTTER SPEEDS: TIME AND MOTION

PART 1: SHUTTER SPEEDS, THE THIRD PHOTOGRAPHIC ELEMENT

We’ve covered framing (the first element beginning with the camera’s viewfinder, continuing to print borders, and extending into multiple frames) and apertures (which control the intensity of exposure to light and are tied to quality of focus). Now we’ll move into another important element of photographic language affecting exposure as well as visual quality and meaning—shutter speeds.

Since the first photographs, images recording blur (movement extruded across the picture plane) have vexed and fascinated photographers and viewers alike. Blurring motion was not a creative discovery; in fact, throughout photography’s early years the available media’s extremely slow light sensitivity meant that photographers (and their subjects) had to go to great lengths to avoid it. But to many, blurred motion in an image was a welcome occurrence, visually interesting and ripe with meaningful potential. And as media sensitivity increased, the degree of freezing to blurring motion could be controlled, and photographers could better use shutter speeds as an aesthetic and communicative tool. As they did, they and visually literate viewers began to recognize how time’s transcription onto photographic media affected visual character and meaning of the image. Like degree of focus, motion in a photograph can be recorded on a continuum of nearly innumerable points ranging from frozen to unrecognizable blur, among other things; and it’s important for photographers to understand how their content’s placement along that continuum creates specific, unique photographic meaning. To start, it takes some technical knowledge.

PHOTOGRAPH © NICOLE KULINSKI, 2006.

The freeze-blur continuum. In this photograph of a traditional Mexican dancer, editorial photographer Nicole Kulinski used a relatively slow shutter speed of 1/4 second with a relatively long 170 mm focal length lens. The dancer is moving the edges of her dress quickly while her face and body stay relatively still, and she is moving toward the camera. These factors (in italics), along with Kulinski’s distance from the subject, combine beautifully to capture simultaneously a graceful frozen moment surrounded by the fluidity of soft blur.

SHUTTER SPEEDS: A BRIEF TECHNICAL REVIEW

The following technical notes are only basic reminders about shutter speeds. If you’re still new to photography or just want a refresher, go to Chapter 2. Reread the information about shutter speeds and exposure, and be sure to do the chapter exercises at the end.

The shutter speed controls the length of time that the medium receives exposure to light, or how long the aperture is open. When you activate the shutter release mechanism, a curtain within the camera opens, leaving nothing between the open lens aperture and the medium (the sensor or film) so that light may enter to create the exposure. There are two basic types of shutter mechanisms, leaf and curtain.

The common whole-stop shutter speeds are:

1/2000, 1/1000, 1/500, 1/150, 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/15, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1″, 2″

While going through this chapter, remember that camera shake—creating a blurry picture from using too slow a shutter speed while handholding the camera—is beyond your control with shutter speeds below the number of the lens focal length. Aside from using a tripod you can avoid it by using a shutter speed number that is at or higher than the focal length of the lens you’re using (i.e., with a 200 mm lens, use a shutter speed of at least 1/250). Understanding shutter speeds and their relationship to the other factors we’ll go over in this chapter lets you control the representation of time and motion in your images. Only practice and experimentation provide enough guidance to control this element of photography to make it effective as a communicative tool. Review these principles in Chapter 2.

ILLUSTRATION © TOBY COCHRAN, 2007.

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Students often question why they should learn these techniques when it’s easy enough to create blur effects in Photoshop. My response is as usual—as photographers we use light to translate the world of motion through the camera and onto static media. You might decide to create freezing or blurring effects in the digital darkroom, but to do it with credence requires understanding how movement, suspended or drawn out against static light-sensitive media, actually looks. We live in an age where many viewers know how movement “should look” in a photograph, so this knowledge helps you create digital effects in which the movement is wholly believable (or incredible, whichever you’re going for) by drawing on the viewer’s suspension of disbelief.

AFFECTING VISUAL QUALITY AND PHOTOGRAPHIC MEANING WITH TIME

We use photography’s technical attributes to communicate with viewers, and as one of those attributes time is no exception. Time is a constant in the realm of photography but is not so in terms of our relationship to it. For instance, imagine a father, just home from work, tired and preoccupied, who goes to the park with his young daughter to push her on a swing. They stay for 20 minutes. For the father it may feel like an eternity; but for the daughter the time has flown by. They both experience the same amount of time passing.

Some years later, the memory of that timeline has reversed—the daughter remembers that her father took her to the park to swing for hours; while the father, tired and preoccupied at the time, remembers it as only a few moments.

So it is with time, or rather, with our experience of it. Every moment is the present fleeting into past, and the future is just ahead. We simply cannot arrest time in order to contemplate it firsthand. But photography has the unique and outstanding ability to change that for us. It captures a direct, objective perspective on time. I call it objective because photographs are captured through the physics of light and time, and the image is of something that was actually there in front of the camera throughout the exact moments of exposure. But for photographers, that objective translation of time onto photographic media creates opportunities for highly subjective expression. By understanding the physical laws governing time’s translation onto static photographic media, we can orchestrate it into different configurations that reflect our own perception of it. So when we capture a photograph, it not only reveals another way of perceiving time (an objective photographic way), but it enables us to express our own perception of how time relates to our given subject. All it takes is technical knowledge, and applying that knowledge to communicate photographically.

Movement recorded in a photograph is dictated by three factors: the shutter speed (duration of the exposure), the static nature of the medium (the flat, stationary, light-sensitive material inside the camera), and the movement in front of the camera or of the camera itself (affected by speed, direction, distance, and magnification/focal length). Photographers use shutter speeds to communicate by controlling the interrelationship among the three factors.

PHOTOGRAPH © JILL P. MOTT, BIRTHDAY PARTY.

Motion and energy. Knowing where to place movement along the freeze-blur continuum helps you to define the energy of a subject or scene. Here, slight blur transfers the excitement of dancing children to viewers.

Explained by photographer Steven Shore, “while photographic media is static, the world flows in time.” Movement captured onto static media for a particular duration of time—30 seconds, or 3 hours, or 1/250 of a second, or 1/8000 of a second (what theorist John Szarkowski calls “a discrete parcel of time”)—creates a range of meanings completely different from those derived by watching the event unfold. These meanings are communicated in part through framing because the photographer determines the specific contents of motion to be recorded in the image (remembering that viewers see and interpret only the motion within the frame’s borders), as well as how the motion itself is registered.

Just as shutter speeds create a broad range of visual effects from freezing to blurring motion, the range of meanings created by those shutter speeds is so great that at polar ends they might have the connotative effect of contradicting one another (depending on the subject matter). While freezing motion in the creation of a sharp, crisp image carries with it connotations of truth, accuracy, and clarity (rightly or not), blurring motion necessarily calls into question the relationship between clarity and truth and forces the viewer to confront the indistinct nature of the blurred content as well as its place in time and space.

A photograph that freezes a moment creates concrete juxtapositions among clearly seen subject matter, allowing viewers to contemplate the moment in time as they imagine it took place. The clarity of frozen time often offers viewers the borrowed confidence of one who sees a thing firsthand, a great service to credence for photojournalists and documentary photographers. It also allows us to carry that moment through time, to view it again and again, and to share with others that same moment of which none of us were a part. Conversely, a photograph containing blurred motion allows a viewer to contemplate a less usual reality, one that is unique because our sense of vision doesn’t transfer blurred motion to the brain. In so doing blurred images offer the possibility of understanding truth of a different order than a frozen moment can reveal. Using slow shutter speeds in relation to particular subject matter can reveal a transitional state of being; it can literally record passing time as it relates to a process, a “discrete parcel of time” on earth, and the very traces left by its movement through time and space. Imagine you are making photographs whose subject is “time” and you decide to use a Newton’s Cradle as your primary content. The object itself indicates energy displacement, and that displacement is evidenced through time (which is what your image is about). You could simply make a photograph of the Newton’s Cradle, with everything in the frame crisply frozen. Or you could place the camera on a tripod, set the object into motion, and using a slow shutter speed capture the device and its surroundings in a static state while blurring the rhythmically clicking ball bearings such that viewers can see the motion extruded into the image. This type of comparison can be applied to a vast range of subjects and makes a significant difference in both the appearance and meaning of your images.

Time’s continuum. Sir Isaac Newton’s cradle demonstrates the conservation of momentum and energy through a simple temporal device. When the cradle is at rest, time seems to be standing still; when its motion is arrested onto photographic media, time seems to be frozen (as in the chaos of the balls in the process of tangling); and when the cradle’s motion is blurred across the media, there is a sense of tracing time.

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THE DECISIVE MOMENT: THREE INTERSECTING FACTORS

As we stated earlier, time is translated onto photographic media resulting from three interacting factors. But what a random result they make without the intervention of the most important factor of all—the photographer’s attention to where they intersect. As photographers, armed with the knowledge that we’re exposing static media to time, we can choose when and how long to release the shutter so we can create meaningful images.

One of the most significant aspects of the intersection of shutter speed, static media, and motion is how we frame it. Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson dubbed our ability to extract meaning by framing a precise moment in time “the decisive moment.” He embraced a way of making photographs in which the photographer mentally recognizes and captures a moment in time when the frame’s visual elements take on enriched psychological meanings. He believed photography’s strength to be “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give the event its proper expression.”

To this day, this “decisive moment” is the very thing that draws many people into photographic practice. It epitomizes the significance of image making for countless photographers from commercial to fine art to documentary work.

PHOTOGRAPH © NICOLE KULINSKI, UNTITLED, 2006.

Decisive moments in time. This photograph was made in the San Luis Valley with a 300 mm lens using f/8 at 1/500 second shutter speed. It represents a perfect moment of tenderness between a mother horse and her foal that existed only in the fraction of a second that the image was made. The shutter speed Kulinski used was fast enough to freeze the movement of the subject and prevent camera shake from the telephoto lens. But beyond that, her attention to the scene unfolding allowed her to capture this specific moment—not the ones preceding it or after it—but the very moment of connection that makes the image meaningful.

CONCEPT AND ILLUSTRATION © ANGELA FARIS BELT, 2010.

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TRANSCRIBING TIME ONTO A PHOTOGRAPH

The three factors that control time in a photograph (shutter speed, static media, and movement) can be combined in several ways to create meaning. There are innumerable degrees between arresting and extruding time, and some images can contain both simultaneously; however, all photographic images delineate time in either single or multiple exposures. In this section of the chapter, we’ll discuss these two manifestations of time and motion in photographs, and in the second section, we’ll touch on bringing these manifestations back into the world of time.

The “Shutter Speeds Time and Motion Continuum” flowchart outlines broad categories for the delineation of time in a photograph. Single moments include three types of time: frozen, blurred, and static. All three are created by single captures (one release of the shutter, no matter how long or short) per single frame and offer a wide range of communicative possibility. Many photographers never move beyond these means of single-moment capture because they offer such rich potential in themselves. The second kind of capturing of time I call multiple moments—a means through which we can overlap exposures onto a single frame or sequence them to make a single statement. These images require a bit more technical know-how, but can expand your visual vocabulary, allowing you to communicate about your subject in ways you might not have considered. Beyond these two means of framing time, we can string together discrete frames in order to make moving single images—images in which single frames create the illusion of motion when the viewer looks at them sequentially through time. This method of delineating time moves a bit beyond the scope of this text but holds potential for anyone wanting to explore analog or video means of creating moving images.

It’s a continuum. These two images were captured using a tripod with the most extreme exposure range the camera afforded to blur and freeze the movement of the rushing water. Notice that the when the ISO changed, the shutter speed and aperture also had to change to maintain equivalent exposures. The blurred image began with 100 ISO and the smallest aperture, and to freeze the ISO changed to 1600 with the largest aperture. These decisions were made to maximize the desired effect. But the visual relationship between the moving water and the still rock with leaves (as opposed to the frozen water image) is dramatically different and therefore has very different connotative meanings. When the water’s movement is juxtaposed with the leaves, their stillness stands out, whereas in the frozen moment everything exists on equal temporal ground and as such the leaves don’t hold attention to the same degree. We’ll expand on these images later in this chapter when we discuss ways of controlling blur that lie beyond the camera’s exposure capabilities.

Frozen Time

The first kind of single-moment capture in a photograph freezes time. When time is frozen in a photograph, two things are at play: movement is occurring (in front of the camera, the camera itself, or both) and that movement is arrested. Here, a “discrete parcel” of fluid time is stopped because the exposure was of a brief enough duration to do so. Frozen time often brings to mind midair fast-action sports photography, but this is not usually the case. In fact, to some degree or another the majority of photographs capture frozen time, because cameras are most often handheld and their own motion during exposure must be arrested. A frozen image shows us the world of motion not visible to our eye, allowing us to pause and consider its contents and what they might mean.

PHOTOGRAPHS © JILL P. MOTT.

Freezing for sport. These two images show how fast action can really be frozen in time. A necessity of sports photographers and photojournalists, freezing time is a skill that takes knowledge of several factors affecting time against static media. In these images all five factors are controlled such that even the rushing water creates solid forms within the picture plane.

Frozen time is used in any photograph where the significance of the image relies on a moving subject suspended in time, as well as in specialty areas such as scientific photography. For whatever reason you want to freeze motion, there are several technical factors to consider, and only practice will enable you to know how to achieve your desired result. Understanding these factors prevents you from capturing an image “that would have been great” if only the motion was completely frozen. Five factors determine the degree of frozen time in a photograph: shutter speed, speed of motion, direction of motion, camera-to-subject distance, and focal length or magnification. Here’s how they work:

1.  Shutter speed. All other factors being equal, the faster the shutter speed, the more frozen the motion will be. Remember that shutter speed freezes camera shake as well.

2.  Speed of motion. All other factors being equal, the faster the subject or camera is moving, the faster the shutter speed must be in order to freeze the movement.

3.  Direction of motion. All other factors being equal, the more parallel to the lens axis the motion, the more frozen it will be. So a subject moving toward or away from the camera will be rendered frozen at a slower shutter speed than a subject moving across (perpendicular to) the camera’s field of vision.

4.  Distance from subject. All other factors being equal, the greater the camera-to-subject distance, the more frozen the motion will be. The closer the subject, the faster the shutter speed needs to be to freeze it.

5.  Focal length/magnification. All other factors being equal, the shorter the focal length of the lens, the more frozen the motion will be; shorter focal lengths (wider-angle lenses) provide less magnification. Conversely, telephoto, micro, extension tubes, and close-up lenses need a faster shutter speed to freeze motion because they magnify the subject. (This aspect of freezing motion is covered in Chapter 4.)

ILLUSTRATION © SHAVVN MARIE CURTIS, 2007.

If movement is perpendicular to the lens axis (across your field of view) a faster shutter speed is needed to freeze it. If movement is parallel to the lens axis (toward or away from the camera) a slower shutter speed can freeze it.

Here is a little something you should know about flash/strobe: As we said, most of the images in the world depict frozen time, but getting extremely fast motion to actually be frozen in a photograph can be tricky. Many of the studio photography images you see (wine being poured, a berry splashing into a glass of some fizzy liquid with even the fizz stopped, dancers doing somersaults in midair) as well as other images of very fast-moving subjects (a hummingbird’s wings frozen in midflight, a racecar speeding past) can only be accomplished through the use of flash or strobe. That’s because the speed of the motion can only be frozen relative to the shutter speed you use. For example, a hummingbird’s wings flap at an average rate of 40 to 60 times per second; I don’t know of a shutter speed fast enough to capture that in the presence of ambient light. But a flash is very intense light; it can be made to overpower the amount of ambient light in a scene and can illuminate the subject in one quick burst averaging 1/2000 of a second. Many cameras shutter speeds go higher than this, but it’s the ambient light that allows blur, so if you remove it from the equation, the flash is better able to freeze. Several strobe units easily accomplish 1/20,000 of a second bursts, making them capable of freezing extremely fast motion. Because this book is about photographic language created through the use of the camera’s technical attributes, the use of flash and strobe is beyond its scope, but research on artificial lighting can only enrich your practice and expand your elements of photography capabilities.

PHOTOGRAPH © DAVID BECKERMAN, GIRL WITH PAIL, NEW YORK, 2003.

Frozen in space. Action doesn’t have to be moving fast to create a powerful frozen moment. Freezing time also has to do with knowing when to freeze it, and choosing the right vantage point to do so. This photograph captures a young child in midstride, freezing her motion (and the motion of others around her) in such a way as to draw connotative meaning between her outstretched arms and the light that seems to emanate from her amid surrounding darkness. The 21 mm wide-angle lens adds to the feeling of space engulfing the girl because of the size-space relationship exaggeration and edge distortion.

PHOTOGRAPH © JILL P. MOTT.

Fast action freeze. This photograph demonstrates the power of frozen time. The image was shot with a 120 mm lens, 3200 ISO, f/2.8 at 1/500 of a second. The distance from the subject helps maximize depth of field even with the large aperture, and the high ISO gives a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the fast action. A blurred image wouldn’t allow us to connect with the emotional intensity of the scene—the rider’s expression, the bronco’s four legs off the ground, the perilous moment before the rider’s fall.

Blurred Time

The second, and perhaps the most intriguing, way of transcribing time in a single capture is blurred time, where the movement in front of the camera or the movement of the camera itself is traced, drawn out across the picture plane. Blurred time opposes frozen time on a continuum; the farther away from frozen time you move any of the factors controlling it, the more blurred the image becomes. There are nearly unlimited ways to delineate blurred time in a photograph; practice and experimentation help you predict and control the effects of time and motion on static photographic media.

There are two particularly useful tools for helping you blur motion—tripods and neutral density filters. (And in the previous chapter we discussed the “mirror-up” function available in many SLR cameras.) When you want to use a long shutter speed to blur only the motion in front of the camera (not the camera itself), it’s best to place the camera on a tripod. If it’s practical for the shooting situation, using a cable release or self-timer is also helpful. These actions will result in an image that places the viewers in a stationary position, looking at time drawing out in front of them. Conversely, when you move the camera around a stationary subject, the image places the viewers “in motion.”

How blurred can you go? An interesting outcome of extreme blur is that if the camera is stationary too long and the blurred motion moves across the picture plane too quickly, the moving objects are “absorbed” into the surrounding contents and can disappear without leaving a trace.

PHOTOGRAPH © DAVID BECKERMAN, TURNSTILE, NEW YORK, 1994.

Tracing human transit. Here, New York photographer David Beckerman placed his camera on a tripod and used a slow shutter speed (1 second) in order to capture with clarity the environment of the subway turnstiles and simultaneously blur the motion of the fast-moving commuters moving through them. Only one face is somewhat distinguishable, and our attention is drawn to her. Notice also that feet and legs that were “planted” throughout the duration of the exposure are clearly seen.

PHOTOGRAPH © JOHN DANEHY, FROM HIS SERIES FRANCE IN PASSING (TREES, LIGHT, SKY), 2007.

Behind the curtain. In this scene of rural France, a slow exposure time combined with the motion of the car determine the degree of blur. Notice that at the same rate of speed, the foreground contents are considerably more blurred than those in the background. Notice, too, that the closer and more blurred the foreground trees are, the more “transparent” they become.

NEUTRAL DENSITY FILTERS

There are times when you want to blur motion beyond the capabilities of your camera’s exposure settings. For instance, you want to blur a waterfall to make it look extremely silky. You set your digital camera to the slowest ISO or buy slow ISO film, and you set your aperture to the smallest setting your lens offers so that you automatically get the slowest shutter speed you can while maintaining good exposure. But if the lighting conditions are very bright, you still might not have a shutter speed sufficiently slow to blur motion to the extent you want. This is where neutral density filters come in; they help by effectively extending your shutter speed range.

Neutral density filters are designed to absorb light before it hits the medium. They are sold in increments that absorb varying amounts of light according to the stop-factor chart (covered in Chapter 2). An ND 2 filter absorbs one stop of light; an ND 4 filter absorbs two stops of light; an ND 8 absorbs three stops, and so on. Neutral density filters can be stacked one on top of the other, but the maximum number of filters you should use at any time is three to avoid a loss of image quality (more layers of glass for the light to transmit through) and edge vignetting.

Singh-Ray Double Ring Vari-ND Duo Filter with polarizing capabilities.

Singh-Ray Variable Neutral Density Filter, 2 to 10 stops.

These unique neutral density filters made by Singh-Ray, are a new kind of neutral density filter. They’re called the Vari-ND and they allow you to “dial in” the exact amount of neutral density you want between two and eight stops (that’s 256 times light absorption!). The advantage is that you only need one filter for a truly remarkable range of control. The company also has a polarizing neutral density filter called the Vari-ND Duo with two independently adjustable rings that control polarization to minimize reflections, and neutral density between 2{2/3} and 8 stops.

Neutral density slows shutter speeds. The image on the left was captured using a tripod with the slowest ISO and smallest aperture available on the camera to allow for maximum blurring of the water. But the blur was not quite dramatic enough, so the addition of an ND 4 filter, which absorbed two stops of light, allowed for an even slower shutter speed and increased motion beyond the camera’s exposure capabilities. The more neutral density you add, the slower the shutter speed and the smoother the movement becomes.

Neutral density filters are indispensable tools for photographers who want control over the degree of motion in their images, and a high-quality glass screw-mount filter will provide that control.

PAINTING WITH LIGHT

A uniquely beautiful way to use blurred time is called painting with light—moving the light source (rather than the content or camera) throughout a long exposure time. In addition to a long exposure it requires a darkened environment, allowing you to literally “paint in” areas of the scene using a flashlight or any small, controllable light source. The effect somewhat softens the overall image by creating a soft, diffuse, and often colorcast glow around painted areas. Because you control the direction and intensity of the light source, you can decide which aspects of the image content to illuminate and to what degree. The image content emerges from a fluid rather than single, fixed light source.

Photographers who paint with light often use colored filters or “gels” (larger, flexible colored filters) over the light source to control the color of light in particular areas of the scene, as well as diffusion filters over the lens during the exposure. Remember, images made by painting with light aren’t blurred in the traditional sense—neither the camera nor the content is moving—but the effect relies on blurred time and can add a sense of mystery to your images.

PHOTOGRAPHS © ANNA ZOROMSKI, BONE-YARD SERIES, PHOENIX MINE, IDAHO SPRINGS, COLORADO, 2007.

Only the light moves. In these images, editorial photographer Anna Zoromski “paints with light” to add a sense of dark mystery and weight to her images of this automobile graveyard through shifting illumination. Arriving on location at dusk, she places her camera on a sturdy tripod and makes her long exposures using two flashlights, which she directs through the scene. Her exposure setting is ISO 100 at f/22 to allow a 30-second long shutter speed.

PANNING

Another means of registering blurred time in a photograph is commonly known as panning—using a long shutter speed while tracking with the motion in front of the camera. The technique is often used by sports photographers; it’s relatively difficult to master but lends itself to a unique combination of motion against frozen elements within the frame. In order to pan, you use a longish shutter speed (say, 1/8 to 1/2 of a second), handhold the camera, and literally move the camera the direction and speed of the subject’s motion across your field of vision. If you can keep the moving subject in the same place in the frame throughout the exposure, then a successful pan is created, rendering the moving subject frozen and all other content blurred because of the motion of the camera. The key is to move the camera at the same rate of speed as the subject’s motion; to accomplish this I recommend that you keep both eyes open before, during, and after the exposure; track the motion with your body for a few seconds before depressing the shutter; and continue tracking at the same pace until the shutter closes again. Keep in mind that the subject has to be moving across your field of vision (perpendicular to the lens) either horizontally or vertically; movement at an angle to the media plane will nearly always be blurred.

Panning creates a tremendous sense of motion depending on how blurred the background is. Because the background motion interacts with the frozen subject, the more blurred it is, the faster the subject is perceived to be moving. Panning technique takes a long time to perfect but is an alternative worth exploring.

PHOTOGRAPH © KATHY LIPPERT, 2007.

Fast-action panning. Western lifestyle and outdoor recreation photographer Kathy Lippert made this image during the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo in Denver, Colorado. Lippert trained her camera on the horse and rider, tracked their motion as they grew closer, and followed them throughout the exposure. The subject is not tack sharp because they were not moving exactly perpendicular to the lens, but the technique still yielded a visually successful result. Panning captured not only the power and speed of barrel racing but also the simultaneous fluidity of the horse and rider’s motion.

PHOTOGRAPH © JILL P. MOTT.

Panning even moderate-speed action. Like freezing and blurring, panning isn’t only good for very fast moving subjects. You can increase the illusion of speed by panning slow-moving subjects, as long as you have the exposure capabilities to do it. In this image the boy wasn’t swinging very quickly, but the pan tracking him for 1/15 of a second makes it feels as though he is.

Static Time

The final method of translating time in a single capture might be confused with frozen time, but there are distinct characteristics. I call this type of time in a photograph static—a form of stasis in which neither the camera nor the subject moves for the duration of the exposure. With static time, the length of the exposure onto the already static photographic medium becomes nearly irrelevant. I say “nearly” because in mixed lighting conditions ambient light sources affect the look of the image by “burning in” (increasing exposure) to a greater or lesser extent. Still, the uniform stillness of the camera and subject give the image a quality unique among the other aspects of time.

In the world of temporally static photographs, time literally stands still. Static time is really a case of frozen time taken to the extreme, as eventually everything in the universe moves or changes. But in a photograph, static time appears quite different from frozen time in that the contents of the image seem at rest, as opposed to seeming arrested in time as they move; as such, these images hold different connotative meanings in relation to their subject.

PHOTO © DAVID BECKERMAN, BETHESDA PASSAGE, CENTRAL PARK, 1994.

Static time has an architectural stability. This image captures the true nature of static time; there is nothing moving in the scene, and the camera itself is still, so the scene carries with it a feeling of solitude, calm, and quiet. The lights at the top draw viewers diagonally into the picture plane where we find only the intense light illuminating the interior space. The image was made with a 4 × 5 view camera on a tripod with a normal focal length lens (150 mm), a small aperture, and 1/2 second shutter speed.

An indispensable tool for creating images of static time is the simple tripod. With it, images can be made to have maximum depth of field and still be static, because the smaller the aperture gets, the longer the shutter speed needs to be, and the more often blur occurs. If the subject is still (a still life, an interior/architectural space, or anything else that isn’t moving or changing) and the camera is on a tripod, then the length of time the exposure takes is completely inconsequential; so with respect to motion, a slow shutter speed can be used to the same visual effect as a fast one.

AMBIENT LIGHT BUILDUP

As previously stated, a subject can be captured in static time using a long shutter speed, if nothing in the image moves. However, one major factor in relation to long shutter speeds and static time is the buildup of ambient light that occurs in the scene. For example, in architectural photography it’s desirable most of the time to produce sharp, clear images of a place using a small aperture for maximum depth of field. When doing so, a sturdy tripod is essential, as is the ability to meter the difference between flash and the various ambient light sources in the scene. When using flash or strobe in combination with ambient light sources, it’s also necessary to understand “light balancing” techniques (which are beyond the scope of this book; research lighting resources for additional information) to adjust your flash output in relation to the ambient light to produce your desired results.

PHOTOGRAPHS © PAUL WEINRAUCH, 2006.

Ambient light building throughout static time. Even if neither the camera nor the content moves during a static time exposure, if there is ambient light in the scene it will build over time. It’s the same principle behind painting with light—the longer the light is allowed to expose the medium, the more intense it will get. In this example, architectural photographer Paul Weinrauch produces static time images that use the color and buildup of ambient light. Using a slow shutter speed, he is able to build upon dusk or dawn light, juxtaposing it with interior lighting, to produce a beautiful visual effect in conjunction with the Victorian architecture that he loves. The slight movement of clouds is the only subtle evidence of blurred time here, underscoring that more than one aspect of time can be captured in a single photograph.

Because the speed of light is constant, time and motion, arrested or traced over static media, are somehow predictably written into light-sensitive photographs. Through the confluence of time, motion, and the duration of the exposure, we translate image content into a fixed position on a continuum from frozen to blurred. In translating time and motion onto a two-dimensional plane, new meanings about a photograph’s subject are created; conceptual ties bind the content to the way it was recorded in time, one of the medium’s most valuable gifts.

As photographic processes continue to evolve, the ways in which time is delineated in images will also evolve. The potential for heightened understanding of any subject that can be rendered through the action of light in a photograph is extensive, and by uniting the photographic process with other time-related processes that potential is exponentially increased. From cinema’s evolving time to image projection, film stills, scanner-as-camera, and animation through photographic sequencing, the medium is rich with possibility. But to capitalize on that possibility, practitioners need to understand how the medium’s grammar operates with respect to the physical laws of time and light, and how our static medium relates to a moving world. By exploring your subject through a range of temporal approaches, you expand your own knowledge of photographic practice, your subject, and how the camera translates time into photographic language.

CHAPTER EXERCISES, PART 1: USING SHTTER SPEEDS WITH YOUR SUBJECT

In these exercises, you want to consider in what ways time and motion relate to your chosen subject or concept. How might freezing, blurring, panning, or a combination of these techniques help a viewer to understand your subject and your point of view about it? These exercises are designed to help you explore your subject and practice your effective use of shutter speeds in relation to the world of motion.

1.  Blurring Time and Motion from the Camera’s Perspective

This exercise is intended to familiarize you with how your own movement or the movement of the camera itself can be used for communicative effect. In other words, you are locating the movement as emanating from your own perspective, and therefore the perspective of the viewer. Approach your subject using a range of slow shutter speeds, and, while moving around your subject or through the content of your images, make photographs. Don’t worry about the results yet; just make photographs.

In the editing process really look at the resulting images on your contact sheets; this is where you’ll discover the unique possibilities that moving the camera in relation to the subject can create. Being open to the images you did capture in addition to the one you tried to capture is where real discovery happens. How do your own movement and the movement of the camera during the exposure create images and meanings that differ from those images in which the camera is stationary and the subject is moving?

2.  Freezing Time

The use of frozen time can lend a great deal of insight about a given subject, in that it gives the viewer the opportunity to pause over an event that has been sliced from and held in time. In this exercise, you should consider your subject in relation to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.” Use a sufficiently fast shutter speed to freeze the motion of your camera if it is handheld and to freeze any activity in the frame’s content, or you might choose to freeze motion using a flash or strobe in a darkened interior, as the duration of many strobe units is faster than the shortest shutter speed on most cameras. Be aware of the juxtaposition of stationary contents within the frame and how they interact with frozen contents.

How does a frozen moment relate to your subject, or how could some secondary contents frozen in midmovement relate to your subject? Consider the natural moving aspects of the content surrounding your subject or the meanings that might be conveyed about the movement of your subject itself. Also consider putting your subject into motion, interacting with it in such a way as to animate it for your viewers.

3.  Personal Direction

Experiment with your own ideas about how to communicate about your chosen subject, genre, or concept as it relates to time and motion. You might choose to use a flash (to freeze motion) coupled with long exposure (to add faint blur) or rear-curtain flash coupled with long exposure. The idea is to use your knowledge about the nature of time and motion as it relates to your particular subject. Create a sequence (covered in the next section) of motion or produce a gestalt image that varies motion within the image. Be inventive, be creative, and think conceptually!

PORTFOLIO PAGES

The photographers represented in this chapter’s Portfolio Pages use a wide range of techniques in which the shutter speed and the world of motion are intertwined to produce images with specific meaning and unique visual character. As opposed to being images about time, their various concepts are expressed through the use of the camera’s ability to capture time.

Like all of the Portfolio Pages in this text, these images are intended not as exhaustive examples of this element’s possibilities but as a source of inspiration from artist-photographers who have successfully employed it in the service of making images that more accurately communicate their meanings. Enjoy the images, read and understand the statements about them, and keep looking for more unique ways to render time in a single frame.

THE LAST COWBOY

ELEMENTS

Documentary photographers have to be quick to respond in rapidly changing situations, and the daily work of cowboys and herds is no exception. Through frozen time, Adam Jahiel describes the details, texture, light, and atmosphere that epitomize cowboy life. Using a medium-format rangefinder camera, he is able to shoot in very low light conditions with slower shutter speeds, because there is no mirror to vibrate the media as there is with an SLR format. Also, the camera allows him to observe the action and determine the decisive moment to release the shutter without his view being blocked by the mirror. He tells his story through peak moments that can never be repeated, and so carries perfect instances through time.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I like to look and I like to share what I see. But I like to do that sharing wordlessly. Over the years, some of my peers have accused me of being mostly interested in the “fringe” people. Maybe so.

But I like to think I am drawn to those who seem to exist outside of time in forgotten corners and cultures. They seem somehow more in touch with, or part of, the human condition.

The FSA photographers of the Depression have always been my role models. They documented people and life in a difficult period of our history, in an honest, straightforward, respectful, and intimate way, and they did so beautifully. And they preserved it forever.

I work in black and white because it allows me to boil elements down to their very essence—shape, lines, and light. Light can be indescribably beautiful and fascinating. I love to watch it completely transform something. The same scene can go from being unremarkable, to extraordinary, and back to unremarkable in a heartbeat. Even after all these years of working, the ability to freeze a moment in time and preserve it forever, although mostly science, to me is really more like magic.

PHOTOGRAPHS © ADAM JAHIEL; FROM HIS SERIES THE LAST COWBOY; 30″ × 30″ GELATIN SILVER PRINTS.

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METABIOTICS

ELEMENTS

What happens when a camera is placed in the hands of a graffiti artist? In the case of Alexandre Orion’s photographs, the relationship between an intentional painting and a random event is frozen in time through the use of the Decisive Moment, allowing for continued contemplation of the moment’s implications. Ranging from humorous to tragic to outright odd, the images set the stage for a juxtaposition that will carry with it the very meaning of the images.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Alexandre Orion grew up on some of the busiest streets in Brazil. As a child in Sāo Paulo, he became accustomed to sidewalks thronged all day and the din of traffic at night. Orion was quick to respond to the street’s appeal, and his first graffiti was done at the age of 14. While driven by adolescent instinct, the hard reality of the streets called for new ideals. Now he draws inspiration from multitudes, silence and thought, experiences and memories, happiness and suffering. Humanity lives in Orion: his time unique, his universe collective space.

Discovering photography in 2000 coincided with his interest in the image theories of Barthes, Dubois, and Aumont. A year later, his Metabiotics project involved finding a place in the city where he would paint the wall and with his camera at the ready, await the decisive moment when people interacted spontaneously with his paintings. Framing the precise situation promoted a joining of painting and real life, encouraging an encounter (or confrontation) between reality and fiction within the field of photography.

This decisive moment of interaction between people and painted image led to Metabiotics, opposing traditional photography’s false idea that all that is photographic is real (in the documentary sense). Metabiotics questions truthfulness: the paintings were actually done in the walls, people really did pass by and act spontaneously, but what we see suggests a type of montage that did not exist. Everything is both true and false.

IMAGES © ALEXANDRE ORION; FROM HIS SERIES METABIOTICS

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STRING THEORY IMAGES

ELEMENTS

Concept and technique merge in these images by Andrew David-hazy. They result from the following process: when confronted with a concept, first thinking about its connotations, then researching those connotations, then using photographic language to communicate it. As discussed in Chapter 1, interdisciplinary research is key to making meaningful images about any subject. These images demonstrate the conceptual/intellectual side of making photographs, and that the technical attributes of the medium are invaluable in helping you to articulate your visual meanings.

STATEMENT OF CONCEPT AND PROCESS

Some time ago I received an email message from an editor who had been exploring my website and who thought I might have some photographs that could be applicable to an article about a theory that has the world of science abuzz—string theory. The truth was I had no photographs of strings in any shape or form but the inquiry started me previsualizing what these images might look like and how to make them.

The request was for an image that would show strings moving and vibrating in odd ways. This reminded me that when held taut, strings in musical instruments plucked in the middle produce sound waves. I also remembered that one could simply hold one end and make the other end move up and down; if done properly this would induce a wavelike motion on the string that under some conditions would be a “standing wave.” So I built a setup to induce waves by attaching the string on one end to the edge of a rotating disk driven by a small electric motor whose speed could be varied. I then attached a small weight to the other, free end and let gravity pull the string down.

Contrary to convention, instead of making a sharp record of the string I purposefully chose an exposure time long enough for the string to make several rotations. This, now, revealed the rotating string not as a single line in space with a wave in it but rather as a “volume,” something that seemed to have a three-dimensional quality. This was a bit more interesting than the plain string picture, but then something unexpected happened. While adjusting the voltage to the motor, it went so high as to cause the rotating string to assume a changing wave pattern, as the weighted-down string could not keep up with the speed of the disk powering it. The string pulled the weight upward, causing the string to perform rather erratic motions.

PHOTOGRAPHS © ANDREW DAVIDHAZY, STRING THEORY.

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I continued photographing and when these images were displayed on the camera’s LCD screen it became clear that as far as an interpretation of a vibrating string that might accompany an article about the string theory, these photographs seemed to hold much more promise than a simple image of a plain string with a wave pattern on it.

TYPOLOGIES

ELEMENTS

Beth Eggleston is a studio and conceptual photographer (and she created the cover image for this edition of The Elements of Photography!). In this series, Typologies, her direct, uninflected approach intentionally speaks to the banal mass-produced and consumed items she studies. She underscores her approach by using parallel picture planes and adhering to static time. Her methods stage a contemplative space of typological image groups—multiple images that compare and contrast similar objects. The individual images feel like mug shots, their austere arrangement drawing attention to both ubiquity and individuality, reality and fakery, in an almost humorous way.

ARTIST STATEMENT

TP Typology

In a saturated market, the most banal products have the fewest opportunities for differentiation. Toilet paper brands fight for every bit of distinction they can, from special lotions to animal mascots. Someone out there gets paid to design toilet paper patterns. Charmin Ultra Strong is geometric and masculine; Ultra Soft is feminine butterflies. Cottonelle has a subtle boring pattern, but a fancy website with a downloadable puppy app.

It’s easy to see some absurdity and to resent having to choose from too many almost-same options. But after you’ve made that choice, a grocery store that doesn’t stock your brand might seem lacking.

Blue

Blue roses don’t exist. They are the Holy Grail of flower breeding. The quest to genetically engineer (and patent and trademark) a true-blue rose has so far only given a lukewarm lilac color.

But fake blue roses are everywhere. They’re the blue raspberries of home décor, the fake that has no original. Individually, their frayed edges and cheesy plastic stems are forlorn, but oddly attractive.

The Closest Shave Yet

Disposable razor manufacturers are locked in an arms race. The battle for the most blades seems to have reached a truce … at five, so the war moves on to dueling handle ergonomics and lubricating strips. Men get “an improved blade suspension system.” Women get “the indulgent powers of the pomegranate fruit.”

Each new model is designed and mass-produced with the knowledge that it is disposable and will quickly become obsolete. But each, individually, is a marvel of shiny symmetry and compound curves.

PHOTOGRAPHS © BETH EGGLESTON; FROM HER TYPOLOGIES SERIES.

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THE GHOSTS OF AUSCHWITZ AND BIRKENAU

ELEMENTS

These images made in former Nazi concentration camps speak of a specific genocide, but Cole Thompson’s approach really speaks to the ghosts of all genocides. They were created using 10- to 30-second long exposures during daylight hours using a tripod and stacked Singh-Ray ND filters totaling 13 stops of light reduction. The challenge of making images reflective of the enormity of his subject was made all the more difficult by casually dressed tourists sporting cell phones moving all around, and that’s where Thompson’s understanding of photographic language came in. He solved two visual problems at once using shutter speeds and time. By adding neutral density, he was able to negate the rather irreverent scenes of tourism, changing them to scenes of ghosted figures haunting the history of these places.

ARTIST STATEMENT

What can be said about Auschwitz and Birkenau that hasn’t already been said? What photographs can be made in these sacred places that haven’t already been made?

As I thought about what had occurred there, I wondered how any human could do such inhumane things, and then I recalled “The Mysterious Stranger” by Mark Twain. In this story a young boy named Seppi is talking to Satan about a man who had brutally beaten his dog. Seppi declared that this man’s actions were inhumane and Satan responded: “No, it wasn’t Seppi; it was human—quite distinctly human.” Satan points out that no other creature on the planet would treat another this way—except humans.

I had not intended to photograph during my tour of the camps, but after being there a few minutes, I felt compelled. With every step I wondered about the people whose feet had walked in exactly the same footsteps. I wondered if their spirits still lingered there today.

And so I photographed ghosts.

PHOTOGRAPHS © COLE THOMPSON; FROM HIS SERIES THE GHOSTS OF AUSCHWITZ AND BIRKENAU; ARCHIVAL DIGITAL PRINTS, 12″ × 12″.

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FINDING VOICE

ELEMENTS

In this series, Susan Lirakis uses long shutter speeds and moving subjects to create images that are less about a specific person and more about something universal. That the person is burred across the picture plane indicates that she is not the primary subject of the image, but rather the transition she goes through.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Although we are ultimately connected, we must make choices about our own pathways, at the crossroads and on the thresholds. We do have comparable life experiences. We undergo similar stages of life, in childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle and old age. Common events bind us together; we are connected by the bonds of relationship and of experiences.

These experiences are frequently represented in the telling of myths and stories, the characters of which become examples for us collectively. I began making self-portraits in an attempt to explore voice and the manifestation of spirit. I have progressed to working with the broader vision of the process of becoming. I have been working with both literal and figurative imagery illustrative of these various life stages and personal quests.

We are all involved in our own process of becoming, yet our quests contain common archetypal elements. Myths are mirrors in which we see our own faces. They speak to us in symbol and paradox. These photographs show us on the threshold of our choices. During periods of passage from one life stage to another, we experience the tumult of making those decisions and the dilemma of choosing. The images illustrate feelings of times of passage, a time when we most frequently access our own soul.

Like myths, these images are filled with feeling and the language of dreaming. They confront the human conditions of our limitations, our process of becoming and transcendence, the sense of who we are in relation to others and our connection with one another and the universe. The images celebrate our wholeness, our value and purpose. Whether or not we question or doubt the existence of greater realities, we tend to wish to see the numinous at work in our objective world. These images chronicle journeys and passages of the soul.

PHOTOGRAPHS © SUSAN LIRAKIS; FROM HER SERIES FINDING VOICE.

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IMAGE © ANGELA FARIS BELT, TREES FOR MY FATHER, DYING, 1997–2009.

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PART 2: MULTIPLE MOMENTS IN TIME

INTRODUCTION: COMBINING SHUTTER SPEEDS TO EXPAND MEANING

Combining multiple moments in a single frame can expand meaning and say things about your subject that a single exposure can’t say. This section adds to the three types of time in a photographic capture by combining them with the use of multiple frames. In this section we’ll cover the four basic ways that multiple moments in time combine to make a single image or communicate about a single subject. The first is overlapped time, which includes multiple exposures both in-camera and montage in the traditional or digital darkroom. The second is sequences (a single narrative or temporal statement viewed over several static images). I have also included the use of scanner as camera and finally moving single images, including tactile images (such as flipbooks and zoetropes) and perceived seamless motion images (such as stop-motion/time-lapse and video). We’ll only touch on the aspects of image making that go beyond the camera’s grammar, but these things are an extension of photographic practice and so should be considered.

The frontispiece for this chapter section came from images I made just after my father died in 1997. I went to our woods and made blurred exposures of a particular favorite tree with my square format Hasselblad camera, and spent varying amounts of time shooting toward the ground and the sky. I shot an entire roll. When I looked at the contact prints, there were four that, when viewed in sequence, visually reflected the feeling of something tangible and heavy passing into weightless ethereal light. Any meaning derived from the images is made possible only through placing the single moments in (blurred) time into a temporal sequence. And that’s where the power of multiple moments lies.

OVERLAPPED TIME: MULTIPLE MOMENTS IN A SINGLE FRAME

Because our medium is static, time can be overlapped onto it. Overlapping time consists of combining separate exposures of discrete instances in time layered onto one media plane. They are capable of creating complex visual interest and meaning, and show us another kind of image that cannot be seen with human vision. There are a number of ways to create multiple exposures; further, each separate exposure is itself created through time capture (frozen, blurred, or static), giving you the opportunity to combine the two attributes in countless ways. Awareness of these kinds of image making techniques opens many doors to communication about your particular subject, making overlapped time an important temporal tool in any photographer’s toolbox. Overlapped time comes in two forms: in-camera multiple exposure and montage in the traditional or digital darkroom. But before you can make images using these techniques successfully, it’s necessary to understand the basic principle of combining exposures to achieve proper density. The following Technical Discussion is primary, but it also might help to reread the Advanced Exposure section toward the end of hapter 2.

Multiple Exposures

The first variety of overlapped time is multiple exposures. These can be done in two ways: in-camera or in the darkroom (traditional or digital). There is another type of multiple exposure we’ll cover as well—sequences—but they operate a bit differently in that although they are interdependent they do not exist the same media plane.

IN-CAMERA MULTIPLE EXPOSURES

In-camera multiple exposures are the result of exposing a single media frame to light more than once. The exposures can be frozen, blurred, or static time, but they should all add up to proper exposure in the final image. This is achieved using the stop-factor chart discussed; remember that manual cameras force you to do this simple math yourself (not a problem once you memorize the whole-stop apertures and shutter speeds!), but more advanced electronic cameras allow you to program how many exposures you want to layer and the camera meters and adjusts for you.

In-camera multiple exposures carry with them compounded degrees of chance and serendipity, technical skill and decisive moments. As opposed to making multiple exposures in the darkroom, the images are not as predictable as you’d expect them to be, and that’s part of the excitement and potential of making them.

TRADITIONAL DARKROOM MULTIPLE EXPOSURES

Also called montage, traditional darkroom multiple exposures are the result of layering separate exposures from individual media frames. Whereas in-camera techniques control the translation of the world in front of the camera onto the capture medium, darkroom techniques using the element of time translate the captured images onto the output medium (the print). The printing aspect of this element of photography only comes into play in a real sense in the traditional (wet) darkroom, because in the digital darkroom the passing of time doesn’t directly affect the visual outcome of the print.

In the traditional darkroom, the enlarger’s timer operates as the equivalent to the camera’s shutter speed; this aspect of photographic image making happens in real time and is the aspect of print exposure that allows the opportunity to dodge and burn and to manipulate the print through movement of the printing paper, the negative, or additional elements during the exposure. It also allows the creation of combination prints, the addition of motion onto the print by moving the paper or objects positioned between the paper and the enlarger light during exposure, and it enables photographers to make multiple exposures onto the printing paper.

Technically, exposure works the same way in the darkroom as it does in the camera, though the longer exposure times allow a greater degree of creative control. The stop-factor chart works the same way in the darkroom, so that if you need a 20-second exposure for proper density in the print, then you can split that time into any number of increments in order to manipulate the element of time to your advantage. You might make two 10-second long exposures; you could place text printed onto acetate in the light path during one of those exposures; you could move the image or paper during one of the exposures; and so on. You might make one 10-second exposure; and two 5-second exposures, and move the negative slightly in between. There are countless ways to use the element of time during the printing process; the key is to do so in such a way that it makes sense for the subject of your images. Photographers also use these practices when making photograms (camera-less images). Perhaps the most significant (and at times frustrating) aspect of manipulating contents during the print exposure is that each print will be unique, as it is difficult to impossible to reproduce the exact degree of movement throughout an edition of prints.

IMAGES © AMY HOLMES GEORGE; FROM HER SERIES AWAKENING TO A DREAM; 9” X 9” ARCHIVAL INKJET PRINTS.

Trading time for layers. In the digital darkroom the passing of time plays no role in the creation of overlapping time images, but “photomontage” derives from traditional photographic practices, including in-camera multiple exposures, and is a natural outcome of technological advancement. In these images, Amy Holmes George uses digital layers to overlap separate photographic exposures and scans, altering the opacity of each layer to control overall density. In the digital realm, your multiple exposures can include scanned (another way of using time) objects and documents, thereby expanding on the use of multiple frames. Essentially, Photoshop’s layering, opacity, and blend mode abilities supplement or replace our traditional use of time in terms of multiple exposures. The layers represent discrete captures, made in time, then combined later on much as one would in the traditional darkroom. Be open, enjoy your digital process, and begin interpreting digitally combined photographic images through the principles you learn as you explore the elements of photography.

DIGITAL DARKROOM MULTI-IMAGE MONTAGE

The digital darkroom equivalent to multiple exposures is something I call “multi-image montage” because it results from “layering” individual frames. In the traditional darkroom, the stop-factor rules of exposure apply; the separate exposures have to add up to the amount of light and density you wish to achieve. But if you’re creating “multiple exposures” from separate captures in the digital darkroom, these rules do not apply, because the element of time is removed. It doesn’t matter how much time it takes you to add and adjust layers; what matters are the opacity (density) and method of blending of those layers. In the digital darkroom, adjusting the opacity of each separate layer is like increasing or decreasing the exposure of each capture, and changing the blend modes (the parameters by which each layer’s tones are combined) expands on your ability to give specific image densities priority over others.

This is an aspect of the “fine art versus commercial” debate that I have too often heard, which I’d like to address here: that traditional darkroom prints can be counted as “Art” (with a capital A) because they’re “hand-made”, while digital prints can’t be counted in the same class because they’re not. Well making prints, whether traditional or digital, primarily entails all of the decisions that lead up to the processing step (things like density, contrast, color, dodging, burning, etc.), not the processing itself. Traditional darkroom processing is, in effect, just “tipping a tray”, which takes no more skill or art than hitting “print” on a keyboard in the digital darkroom. Indeed many traditional darkroom photographers, unbeknownst to viewers, pay skilled printers to process for them, and we nonetheless call their work art. Media is media; as my graduate school professor Joseph Grigely said, “You can’t be dependent on any one technology to make your art.” The art is in the concept, vision, and execution of craft. Period.

This isn’t a Photoshop textbook; it’s a book about photographic language and using the camera as the means of interpreting and communicating about the world. But mimicking certain camera effects digitally is a viable, and in some cases necessary, substitute (for things like adding historical and other types of imagery). In this respect, and combined with in-camera techniques, the digital darkroom actually offers a wider range of possibilities for delineating time. The bottom line is, the medium doesn’t matter, but understanding how time looks when captured through traditional means helps you to create more believable (or fantastical) photographic effects in other ways.

PHOTOGRAPHS © ANGELA FARIS BELT, STORM, JACKSON LAKE, WYOMING, 2007.

Tell me a story. A cloudy day at Jackson Lake gave way to a stormy evening that resulted in a snow-covered morning. The end. A sequence of images can tell a story as complex as War and Peace, but it doesn’t have to. In fact, most sequences expand on the notion of a single moment in time through only a few moments in time. The challenge is to consider what several frames in sequence might say about a subject that a single frame couldn’t.

SEQUENCES: SPACING MULTIPLE FRAMES

Another means of using multiple frames that I categorize under “multiple exposures” is the sequence. Sequences are several discrete images that must be read in a specific order to communicate. They can be broken down into two categories, narrative and temporal, and they have no set number of images. I place sequences with time and motion (as opposed to multiple frames, covered in Chapter 2) because they don’t operate on the same principles of gestalt. Multiframe and gestalt images (such as diptychs, panel panoramas, and contact sheet images) are not viewed temporally; their meanings derive from the combination of all images at once. Sequences, on the other hand, are temporally based, read one at a time; their meaning is derived from seeing the individual images in specific succession.

Like other multiple-frame images, sequences are held together through gestalt, but not through the visual gestalt that allows a multiframe panorama to read as a continuous view made from separate parts. Sequences are held together through a conceptual gestalt; for the sequence to be read and understood, narratives need to cohere and time should progress in some sort of logical manner. If the order of images in the sequence leaves gaps that are too wide for the viewer to bridge, then the meaning is lost because the piece as a whole can’t communicate. Sequences also hold together visually in that images generally cohere better if they are related in appearance (density, contrast, color, etc.). Because they are made from multiple discrete frames, however, there are no strict rules about aesthetic appearance—only more and less successful ways of relating the images to make a visual statement.

A narrative sequence tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Is your subject, say, about children at water parks? What if you photographed a child climbing to the top of a high dive platform, struggling to keep his nerve, going back toward the ladder, turning back around to face his fear, back and forth again, jumping—and finally emerging from the water with an exuberant show of pride and personal victory? This story could be told in as few as six images, but it just can’t be told the same way without a sequence. It relies on more than one photograph to contextualize the others, and sequences do just that.

The second type of sequence is temporal, one that shows a passing of time or the evolution (or devolution) of some process. How might this aspect of the element of time relate to your specific subject? Does your subject display a process that unfolds over time? For example, your subject is botanicals or flowers. What experience of these plants might a viewer gain by seeing a sequence from seed to sprout through full bloom and death? Or, what if you place your camera on a tripod and shoot every 30 minutes from dawn to dusk a plant in a windowsill following the arc of the sun; it’s interesting to view in sequence because it’s something we rarely see. Who has the time? Say your subject is “ice.” Let’s watch it melt. Say your subject is “birth.” Let’s see a hatchling break through and emerge from its eggshell. Whatever your subject is, although it might not “tell a story” it is likely still influenced by time, which opens up potential for communicative power through sequences.

To summarize this unique type of multiple moments in time, sequences all have one thing in common—they freeze, blur, or capture static individual moments in time and place them in a particular order. While you might think that the video medium “does it better” (an argument I hear quite often from video artists), they are really two very different things. We’ll discuss video later in this section. But with respect to sequences, they rely on viewer participation in reading the images more so than video. In effect, video fills in all temporal gaps through rapidity, whereas sequences leave intentional gaps for viewers to ponder and fill in for themselves. Like framing itself, the success of a sequence is as much about what we as photographers leave out as what we leave in. The most successful sequences engage viewers in the aspects of the piece that aren’t there, making the space between frames as relevant as the images themselves.

SCANNER AS CAMERA: WHEN THE MEDIUM MOVES

At the beginning of this chapter we said that the photographic medium is static, but the world flows in time, and that the duration of the exposure dictates the visual appearance (and contributes to the meaning) of images, ranging from motion to blur. But what if the medium were, in effect, not static—that is, what if exposing a single frame took thousands of sequential exposures in a particular direction across the picture plane? How would the world of time and motion translate in relation to a medium that is itself exposed through its own time and motion? These are interesting questions whose answers can be found in current technology. It’s a camera that anyone with ingenuity, and research and fabrication skills, can make—a flatbed scanner camera. Scanner cameras are made of flatbed scanner parts attached to a camera body (preferably large format) with a secondary medium that holds the resulting images. Making one (and making it work) can be very involved, and the methods vary widely depending on the scanner you choose to disassemble; for this reason we won’t cover the process here, but if you’re interested, you can easily find helpful tutorials online. I do, however, want to discuss this kind of technology’s relationship to time and motion, show some images made with it, and consider its aesthetic and communicative potential.

Scanner camera images have distinct characteristics evident even to nonphotographers. These characteristics are a direct outcome of the way the scanner captures an image—its response to time and motion both in front of the camera and of the sequential exposure across the medium itself. Whereas conventional cameras (relatively speaking) expose the entire static media plane simultaneously, scanner cameras expose the media plane sequentially across its plane. Each scan happens line by line, a pixel width at a time, in minute fractions of a second, and the number of lines dictates exposure time. Depending on the scanner resolution (the higher the resolution, the slower the scan), an image can take from 30 seconds to 10 minutes to expose.

Perhaps the most unique attribute of scanners and scanner cameras is their relationship to time and motion. Like conventional cameras, if nothing in front of the camera moves and the camera itself doesn’t move, then the effect is static time. But here, blurred time is different; anything that moves during the exposure is subject to stretching, compression, and other kinds of distortion. Although scanner camera distortion may seem random at first, when you begin to analyze it you find a method to the madness that you can control. Affecting how movement translates in a scanner image are the following factors:

PHOTOGRAPHS © ANDREW GROTE, 2010.

Scanning the scene. Using his homemade flatbed scanner 4 × 5 view camera, photographer Andrew Grote examined the goings-on of city life. Because of the scanner’s orientation, the speed of its exposure, and the movement in front of the camera, his images contain forms that are alien to us, juxtaposed with identifiable frozen moments. Grote retained the borders, which are an organic outcome of his process, consciously not cropping because of how they visually engage with the image content and because they serve as a vignette to hold the viewer’s eye inside the frame. See more scanner camera images in this chapter’s portfolio pages.

•  The resolution of the scanner. The speed of the exposure depends on the number of lines scanned; the greater the number of lines, the greater the resolution (a larger image is produced).

•  The direction and orientation of the scan relative to the direction and speed of the movement. The scanner can be oriented to expose horizontally or vertically from left to right or right to left, or to expose vertically from top to bottom or bottom to top.

•  The precise position of the scan line relative to the position of the subject. If throughout the scan nothing moves, the result is static time. If the subject moves against the direction of the scan, then only parts of it are recorded. If the subject moves in the direction of the scan, then it is extruded across the picture plane.

Images from scanner cameras reveal the world of time and motion in ways we cannot see in frozen, blurred, or panned photographs. In fact, because the media exposure moves sequentially, the images act as a sort of timeline that starts reading from where the scan began and ends where the scan ends. We can watch time unfold across the media plane when movement occurs in the same relative direction and speed as the scan, or we only see slivers of contents that moved against the scan direction. Contents in the scanned image can “disappear” into the medium in much the same way as subjects moving fast during a very long exposure (discussed in the section “Blurred Time”). Engaging the way a scanner sees has as much potential as engaging the way a camera sees; it’s a tool of the digital age that adds to our visual vocabulary and our ability to communicate photographically.

MOVING SINGLE IMAGE FRAMES

As photographers, we are moved by the power and dedicated to the lasting validity of the still image. We look at a single photograph and recognize it as a miraculous confluence of time, focused light, and attention onto photosensitive materials. Photographs are worth countless words, able to communicate volumes of a kind very different from written language. But as practitioners we’re also curious about the limits of the medium and our own ability to use it, and so we experiment along its edges. And then we come to an edge where multiple frames begin to move closer and closer to time—multipanel panoramas, multiple exposures, sequences, and scanner cameras—all push our ides about what constitutes a single photographic image.

But what happens when multiple photographic images move beyond that edge and the “whole picture” cannot be read until it is brought back into a temporal space—until it is read through time? What if a single photographic statement is made not by combining multiple frames into one, but through viewing them one after the other in quick succession? We have images like these, images that create perceived seamless motion; although the images’ contents aren’t moving, they create the illusion of motion when viewed temporally. The illusion of motion produced by sequenced single frames (particularly in film and video) is as real, or perhaps even more so, as the illusion of depth in a two-dimensional photograph. There is no moving content within the picture planes, but the sequencing and placement of content relative to our viewing it in time make it look as though it does. This allows such works of photography to communicate about a subject in a way that a single image and nearly all gestalt images cannot.

ZOETROPE © CYNTHIA GREIG; FROM HIDDEN FROM VIEW, 1995, COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS, ALUMINUM, WOOD AND LIGHT, 48” × 48”.

Still and spinning. These installation views of Cynthia Greig’s zoetrope, Hidden from View, shows the scale of the object (left) and demonstrates that you see the images through it as it spins (right). In this zoetrope, we see a human figure in front of a horse rearing back. Because the slits pass by your eye quickly when the drum is spun, illuminated sequential images create the illusion of motion. Notice that even to clearly explain how zoetropes work, two different types of time and motion capture were used! See more of her work in the Portfolio Pages of Chapter 6.

Tactile Images: Flipbooks and Zoetropes

I refer to the first type of perceived motion images as tactile—images intended to be read through direct physical interaction with a viewer (generally an individual or a small group). “Moving” tactile images assume an interactive relationship between the method of viewing and the viewer, with the viewer’s interaction dictating the pace at which the extruded images evolve. This interaction also determines much of the visual quality of the image, those qualities that come from viewing the images in time. Tactile motion images include such things as flipbooks and zoetropes. Although they’re very different objects, they operate on similar principles of time and motion.

Flipbooks—yes, the same ones we played with as children—have to be handled, their pages “flipped” through our fingers to reveal a sequence of images playing out through time. If the images are sequenced properly, having very small gaps in content from one image to the next, then through rapid succession we see their content appear to move. The size and scale of most flipbooks are small, the size of a personal object or snapshot. I recommend embracing your inner child and buying one from your local bookseller; they can be enormously fun and can provide inspirational food for thought about making your images move.

Zoetropes (Greek, roughly translated “turn of life”) are another kind of tactile device that create the illusion of motion from multiple still frames. Although earlier versions existed, the modern zoetrope was invented in the early to middle 1800s. They create perceived motion by allowing pictures sequenced inside a hollow drum to be viewed through slits cut opposite them. The drum is mounted on a spindle to allow the images to spin past your view through the slits; the faster it spins, the smoother the perceived motion of the image.

Perceived Seamless Motion: Forward Through to Video

Other kinds of perceived seamless motion—film and video—images provide viewers with even more believable illusions of seeing actual movement. We can do this because the timing between the frames passing before our eyes (frame rate) can be precisely controlled to sync with human vision, creating slow, normal, or fast motion sequences. This illusion is as powerful as a two-dimensional picture plane creating the illusion of depth; we look at a two-dimensional plane, but we mentally construct a three-dimensional space;

IMAGES © KRISTINE GRANGER FROM HER VIDEO “JOUISSANCE.”

A temporal sequence of film stills. Video frames are viewed over the same spatial plane rapidly over time, like these four frames are supposed to be viewed. But here they exist as individual frames edited from a longer video piece sequenced in proximity to one another. We have the sense that time is passing, but we don’t actually see it seamlessly, making it a very different experience for us as viewers. See more of her work in this chapter’s Portfolio pages.

we look at a movie and know that the image isn’t really moving, but our eyes allow us to accept it.

Too, there are some advantages to capturing video that, if we “pull them apart,” we can utilize in still photography. Think about it; narrative and temporal sequences allow viewers a different level of interaction with the entire image sequence because of gaps between the images being read simultaneous to the images themselves. Although video fills in those gaps, it only does so when viewed in rapid succession. As photographers we can capture video for the purpose of bringing select images back into the still realm. Like viewing a contact sheet, a sequence of video stills can be edited to make a singe statement different from or beyond what the video seen in time could make. The potential in pulling apart individual image frames, which can be cropped, toned, adjusted to the look you want, and resequenced, is a photographic gold mine; we create a new form of gestalt experience for viewers.

In the digital age, the potential for mining video for its individual frames offers another benefit—it gives us a second chance to “capture” the decisive moment—only it’s done after the fact, during editing. This generation of digital cameras capture film-quality video in individual, sequenced frames, and photographers are discovering that they can find the “perfect” frame by capturing many of them. Video allows them to slow down time, to look at the event again in time, and to capture the moment after the fact. With respect to photographic language, video gives the option of leaving no temporal gaps in the narrative or temporal sequence by showing it in the rapid succession that was intended or adding the temporal gaps by recontextualizing selected image stills into a single gestalt image.

Like the scanner cameras, the digital age has made readily available this dynamic way of using multiple frames in time. Video is within the grasp of any photographer; many DSLR cameras have HD video capability (as do some cell phones!), and there are several software programs for video editing in what we might someday call the “video darkroom.” The potential is limitless for any photographer interested in pursuing image making on the edges of time. And although video is its own art, the principles of photographic language can be applied to it to more meaningfully explore your subject. The potential lies in keeping an eye toward both ends of the medium’s time continuum, and embracing the ever-expanding practices which add to our knowledge and abilities as photographers.

CHAPTER EXERCISES, PART 2: EXPERIMENTING WITH MULTIPLE MOMENTS

This section of the Chapter Exercises pushes your ability to use photographic language. These exercises capitalize on combining multiple frames with time related to your subject. Consider choosing just one of the exercises and producing several pieces using the methods so that you can concentrate on a particular kind of image construct more intensely.

STOP-MOTION SEQUENCE © ANGELA FARIS BELT, THE CAT WANTS OUT, 2011. VIEW IT AND OTHER STOP-MOTION ANIMATIONS ON MY WEBSITE, WWW.ANGELAFARISBELT.COM.

Stop-motion animation: the cat wants out. As I was photographing a simple shadow falling inside my screen door and onto a broom, I noticed my cat Luna(tic) walk into the frame. Rather than stop shooting, I waited to see what she would do, and since my digital camera has rapid-fire capabilities, I depressed the shutter and kept shooting using continuous mode. While the frame rate is not fast enough to provide seamless motion quality, when the images are stacked and play by rapidly in time they provide a unique, fluttering sense of motion that adds comedy to the way we view the scene. You can also move your eyes across these images sequentially and have an understanding of the movement that was happening, because your mind fills in the gaps. If when viewing my contact sheets I had ignored the images, I would have missed the potential of this stop-motion sequence. It doesn’t “read” properly as a contact sheet or printed sequence, so placing them back into the temporal realm for viewing provides the proper context for viewing the whole picture.

Remember to discuss your results with a community of peers in the classroom, in a critique group, or online.

1.  Multiple Exposure or Montage

Do you enjoy pushing your camera and exposure skills? How about your ability to conceptualize what will be in a frame? Using your camera of choice, decide upon several scenes that you believe would make a statement about your subject if combined into one frame. Use the stop-factor chart to help you expose the frames properly.

Do you enjoy working in the darkroom, building images in addition to capturing them? This exercise might be for you. Decide upon several images that you would like to combine using separate time exposures in the traditional darkroom or layers in the digital darkroom. Use your technical skills to arrange the images with the density you wish to have.

Whichever you choose to do, make several attempts at each image, varying the densities of the montaged frames in order to change the contents that take priority. Remember, when there are two or more exposures on a single frame, then natural hierarchies will be created depending on the balance of exposures.

2.  Sequencing Photographs

Construct a narrative or temporal sequence of images that allow viewers to experience something about your subject through several frames in close proximity to one another but that also rely on one another to communicate meaning. Arrange your sequence vertically, horizontally, or in whatever way makes the most sense for your piece.

3.  Optional Exercise

This exercise is for any of you who want to push the limits of your knowledge and skill in digital media. While remaining on track with your chosen subject, consider shooting with a flat-bed scanner converted to a camera, or consider shooting video and editing specific frames to sequence or build into a multiframe gestalt image. Notice the unique character and quality of the images you get using these media as opposed to a conventional camera.

PORTFOLIO PAGES

These Portfolio Pages contain such a wide range of photographic practices that it might not be apparent at first how they fit together into one collection. To help clarify (as in all the Portfolio Pages), I have provided some thoughts about why I chose each artist’s work, and how it fits within the elements of photography.

The artists here represent their subjects through separate exposures of discrete instances in time layered onto one media plane, or separate exposures that must be read sequentially to communicate their meaning. Their images broaden our understanding of a subject and how photographic language can encapsulate it. In addition to the range of practices and technical approaches, the range of subjects and complexity provides a good basis for critical discussion.

PSYCHQMETRY

ELEMENTS

Who says traditional darkroom photography is dead? These images by artist Carol Golemboski demonstrate the unique forms of imagery that can be created through the element of time and its relationship to positive and negative densities. Understanding this relationship allows her to combine exposures from negatives as well as add drawings and other marks on a range of translucent to transparent materials for specific exposure and density effects. She also uses Ortho-Litho film to create templates for black marks, drawings, and text. In this way her images are one of a kind, using “mixed media” art techniques.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Psychometry is a series of black and white photographs exploring issues relating to anxiety, loss, and existential doubt. The term refers to the pseudo-science of “object reading,” the purported psychic ability to divine the history of objects through physical contact.

Like amateur psychometrists, viewers are invited to interpret arrangements of tarnished and weathered objects, relying on the talismanic powers inherent in the vestiges of human presence. These images suggest a world in which ordinary belongings transcend their material nature to evoke the elusive presence of the past.

Through an examination of fortune telling and clairvoyance, many of the images confront the desperate human desire to know the unknowable, historically referencing the Victorian interest in spiritualism as well as the look of the 19th-century photographic image. Illegible text and arcane symbols in pictures with themes like palm reading, spoon bending, and phrenology force the viewer to consider man’s insatiable need to anticipate his own fate.

The success of these images relies on the viewer’s expectation of truth in the photograph, expanding on age-old darkroom “trickery” to suspend belief between fact and fiction. The romantic ideas suggested by these photographs are enhanced by the nostalgia that accompanies historic photographic imagery, the process of traditional printmaking, and the magic of the darkroom.

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IMAGES © CAROL GOLEMBOSKI; FROM HER PSYCHOMETRY SERIES; TONED GELATIN SILVER PRINTS, 17.5” × 17.5”

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PHOTOGRAPHS

ELEMENTS

I first became aware of Robin Rhode’s work when I saw it on the cover of Art in America in 2009. I’m always intrigued by how performance artists and others whose works are temporary use photography to not only document but also to contextualize and share their work with a larger audience. These photographic constructs become new artistic statements, disconnected from the original work, but able to communicate in direct reference to the performance and its subject.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Embracing a variety of media—principally photography, but also drawing, animation, performance, and sculpture—the work of Robin Rhode uses simple, ephemeral devices (soap, charcoal, paint, and chalk) to comment on urban youth culture, colonialism, and socioeconomic issues in a simple, witty, and subtly effective way. His work often uses the street as his canvas or his backdrop, alluding to hip-hop and the role of the graffiti artist, and he often operates within the gritty aesthetic associated with that culture.

Rhode’s work, however transient it may seem, involves creating a kind of narrative that contains several stages of erasure and redrawing with the trace of his actions remaining visible throughout. There is also a pervasive mood of failure, while his persistent gestures toward ludicrous and apparently unachievable goals are as poignant as they are humorous. Rhode draws a skipping rope and cajoles a room of people to engage in a game of Double-Dutch with him, or he plays an upside-down game of snooker that only he can win—the challenger is absent and the game defies logic and gravity. For another work, Rhode fashioned a bike out of soap, rendering the object comically futile. While his work calls to mind early silent film, stop-start animation, and flip books, Rhode’s alter ego—a recurring feature—evokes a character from 19th- and early 20th-century American minstrel shows and the exploits of Buster Keaton. Rhode’s practice straddles both the recent past, when one only needed a ball or a yo-yo in your pocket for amusement, and the constant, overwhelming stimuli of the present day. —By Michele Leight

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PHOTOGRAPHS © ROBIN RHODE; FROM VARIOUS WORKS.

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THE VINTAGE SERIES: SCIENTIFIC INQUIRIES

ELEMENTS

There is no right or wrong photographic medium, only those that bring you closer or farther from articulating your meaning. Artist Jean Miele fuses all things photographic, from traditional to digital. He carries historic images through time, scanning aspects of them to recontextualize in digital montage. He adds borders and embosses his printing paper to reference his sources and inspiration, in addition to layering scans of historical artifacts such as ancient manuscripts, maps, star charts, and ships’ logs. By merging process with image content, he creates unique and beautiful images that reference the medium’s history while articulating his subject—the timeless universal questions surrounding who we are and why we’re here.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The Vintage Series: Scientific Inquiries is a portfolio of photomontages relating to the history of science, mysticism, theology, cartography, cosmology, and photography. The work explores the 292 I idea that these are intertwined disciplines and all arise from the fundamental human need to ask, “Who are we, and what is our place in the universe?”

To that end, the deliberately small scale of these images, deceptively ambiguous navigational aids, and barely legible text reflect the way answers to the questions that are most important to us are always just slightly beyond our grasp. No matter how advanced the methods or technology we bring to bear, “facts,” scientific and otherwise, inevitably change over time. Ironically, counterintuitively, the seeming outward precision of these images hides an underlying, and perhaps greater, exploratory—or divinational—function. Defining the seen, the known, the possible, implies a line of demarcation. By delineating terra firma, we provide access to terra incognita.

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PHOTOGRAPHS © JEAN MIELE; FROM THE VINTAGE SERIES: SCIENTIFIC INQUIRIES; 8” × 10” ON HAND-EMBOSSED 16” × 20” WATERCOLOR PAPER.

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STARS

ELEMENTS

When I first saw David Stephenson’s images in the Cleveland Museum of art, I was drawn to them from a distance because of the graphic arcs alone. When I realized the “designs” were made from his interaction with star trails over time, I also realized that Stephenson had taken standard blurred-time image of stars and coupled it with another way of recording time—the multiple exposure. The resulting images are a fascinating study of both the star trails and the way their light relates to time itself.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My photographs of star-filled night skies in 1995 and 1996 looked to the celestial realm for a sublime space in nature. Any photograph records a specific moment when light strikes film or paper—and in this sense it is always a document of time itself. In my photographs of the night sky, the light of distant stars may take tens of thousands of years to reach us, and so my camera was recording the present moment but also looking back into time, using light originating from distant prehistory, and the movement of the earth, to “draw” on the film. The Stars series evolved from an initial exploration of black and white silver prints in 1995 to the color images of 1996. By rotating the camera while overlaying as many as 72 multiple exposures, I was able to build up complex patterns that have affinities with the geometric structures of cupolas and mandalas, as well as system-based minimalist art. Extending Talbot’s metaphor of photography as the pencil of nature, the stars are drawings whose marks result from the movement of the earth and a stationary camera that is periodically moved through a sequence of predetermined positions.

PHOTOGRAPHS © DAVID STEPHENSON, FROM HIS SERIES STARS; 1995–1996; 28” × 28” COLOR PRINTS. COURTESY OF JULIE SAUL GALLERY, NEW YORK.

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ARCHITECTURAL APPARITIONS

ELEMENTS

The ghostly apparitions emerging from T. John Hughes’s color photographs are made possible through the digital darkroom’s ability to layer discrete moments in time captured decades apart. Using layers to control density in the same way that traditional photographers use the stop-factor chart for multiple exposures, Hughes approaches media as a means to make a comparative statement about the nature of change in the built environment.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Architectural Apparitions calls on me to be a photographer, a researcher, and a bit of a detective. My fascination with change and the built environments of cities is apparent within this work. These ghosted images are not uniformly architectural jewels whose passing is to be mourned, as I choose to use a wide array of structures to place within what would be their current locations. I prefer to show a variety of subjects and stimulate a discussion about what should stay and what should or could go. I comb through books, library photo collections, Internet sites, and government databases to see which older images are interesting and available.

As much as anything I have the intention generating a feeling in the viewer about change over time. My idea for Architectural Apparitions actually predated the availability of digital technology that made the images practical to produce. I would often spend time thinking about how earlier lives had occupied various spaces.

The detective work comes in as I search to find the right spot where some earlier subjects existed. It can be both frustrating and exhilarating. Streets change, peoples’ memories are not always accurate, historical maps conflict, and whole areas can be completely transformed. And so when I find a distant hill, an almost hidden roof, or some other clue that orients my older image to the current setting, I experience one of the most rewarding aspects of the whole process.

Historical images: Denver (William Henry Jackson/Western History Collection, Denver Public Library); Pittsburgh (Charles W. Shane/Historic American Engineering Survey); Madison (Stanley Charles Hanks/Wisconsin Historical Society); and Detroit (Allen Stross/Historic American Building Survey).

PHOTOGRAPHS © T. JOHN HUGHES, FROM HIS SERIES ARCHITECTURAL APPARITIONS; ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINTS.

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THE ROAD TO STILLMORE

ELEMENTS

What constitutes the decisive moment in a digital age? Would Cartier-Bresson have allowed himself a second chance at capturing that moment, or let it disappear into memory? We can’t answer for him, but we can look to contemporary photographers like Anna Norton who use video to capture several minutes of seamless motion, only to edit the individual frames down to the one that best represents her subject. These images are notably less resolved than conventional photographs resulting from video quality capture, though the technique is primarily visible only when the images are enlarged to her choice in size—30” × 30”. That’s part of the point, and eventually photographers will have to decide whether to maintain or manipulate the improved quality to make their statements. But here we are treated to images that feel like memory through their indistinct quality, color, and slight movement.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Photographs from the series The Road to Stillmore begin my current exploration into the medium of digital photography, in particular video capture. Iconic stills are collected from video recorded while passing briefly through the landscape of my childhood home in Southern Georgia. The resulting image quality creates photographs that speak to Impressionistic landscape painting when viewed from a distance; however, from close range the forms of the landscape break apart into digital texture. Although the images are captured in a particular place, the scenes of apparent rural simplicity combined with pixilation leave the viewer with a mixed sense of past and present.

PHOTOGRAPHS © ANNA NORTON, FROM HER SERIES THE ROAD TO STILLMORE, 2006; 24” × 30” ARCHIVAL INKJET PRINTS FROM VIDEO STILLS.

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COLLECTIVE MEMORY

ELEMENTS

We walk through museums viewing one image at a time; we page through books taking in one spread at a time. But how do those images and pages accumulate in our psyche, intellect and experience? It’s hard to imagine making photographs that adequately address that question, but Doug Keyes uses the temporal element of photographic language to overlap time into a single frame, capturing each page of the book once it’s turned. The 10 to 40 multiple exposures transcend time, allowing us to see something that human vision and our own existence in time won’t allow—an entire book at once.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Working under the premise that all things in our universe are connected, Keyes’s work investigates the interconnectedness of ideas. As an artist and graphic designer, Doug Keyes is hyperaware of the ways in which information and images are conveyed to the public. He is equally aware of the way knowledge stacks upon itself over time, leaving an impression or collective memory.

Using books and documents from Keyes’s own collection as well as friends and relatives’ personal favorites, the topics cover a broad spectrum of inquiry, invention, and expression. Produced with multiple exposures of all the pertinent pages of each book, Keyes’s luminous color photographs reveal (or conceal) the entire contents in a single image. The result is a condensed document of the ideas contained within as well as the physical identity of the book itself.

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PHOTOGRAPHS © DOUG KEYES, FROM HIS SERIES COLLECTIVE MEMORY; DYE COUPLER PRINTS MOUNTED TO ACRYLIC, WOOD FRAME; DIMENSIONS VARIABLE.

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SCANNER PORTRAITS

ELEMENTS

Digital technology has changed, and will continue to change, the way photographic images are made and perceived. This change allows us to see and experience in new ways, to expand our thinking about what constitutes a photograph, and allows photographic images to show us realities previously beyond our grasp. The scanner camera is one of the newest devices in the arsenal of photographic equipment, and Andrew Grote is one of the pioneers embracing it. His images demonstrate the nature of time on the medium and use that medium to help him comment on our existence in time.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I have always loved mixing graphic and photographic art, from old techniques to hybrid workflows. I am searching for a new way to capture images while simultaneously embracing a romantic connection to old world techniques. To achieve this vision I have taken digital technology, a flatbed scanner, and retrofitted it to the back of a large-format view camera.

I am attracted to the extremely high resolution and fine detail of the scanner camera. The speed of the camera is controlled by its resolution—the higher the dpi, the slower it reads and the longer the exposure. Images from this capture device are stretched or compressed, depending on the scanner’s orientation on the camera, the direction of the scan, and the motion in front of the camera during the exposure. I effect and manipulate the effects while shooting by choosing scanner orientation or by instructing subjects to change position during the scan.

I have always believed that the camera captures people’s spirits or personalities; this is a study of how technology perceives humans. The human body is made of cells and every image is made of pixels. Every piece of the image is unique just as people are unique. By connecting threads of technique and a passion for people within my work, I have found a different way to capture the similarities. My photographic practice attempts to bridge gaps between modern and postmodern processes by combining characteristics of each.

PHOTOGRAPHS © ANDREW GROTE, FROM HIS SCANNER PORTRAITS.

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STILLS

ELEMENTS

When I viewed Kristine Granger’s Jouissance video I was mesmerized, taken aback by the still-frame nature of the moving images, and I knew that from now on there is an inseparable connection between still photography and its rapidly sequenced counterpart. The simple beauty of the movement combined with the vertical lines, flicker, and pacing of the images themselves lends the piece a feeling of primal familiarity, of the home movies of the past, and of something universal that continues beyond the video loop. As a sequenced grid of stills removed from their original context, the images you see here are very different from the original experience that was intended; I recommend going online to see the video in motion on hers or another video website.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am interested in the psychological and physiological imprints that memory carries. The elasticity of our beings: when one has been stretched so far, what are the effects, or if there is a repeated pattern, can it be broken by perseverance of self? My work communicates my personal and emotional state in relation with the surrounding world as I have experienced it. I investigate what makes a person, the moments in one’s life lives where events or individuals have made an imprint, handprint, or shadow. These pivotal moments change you for the rest of your life; they are moments where personal decisions are made and their effects felt. My work derives from very personal events, but I believe the work’s strength is that there is the shared experience enacted by the viewer. The continuation of the experience that is created at that moment then becomes a memory for the viewer.

Haunting explores the structure of an affective social experience and the unconscious, but it also explores the exchange between the defined and the inarticulate, the seen and the invisible, the known and the unknown. This installation included the zoetrope with its interior walls replaced with 13 digital solarized photographic self-portraits. The self-portraits are against a black background, and the figure is nude. The figure begins curled in a fetal position; the next images move from the curled position to a standing position, and then back to a curled position. The figure appears to have a wet metallic sheen like mercury; there is a white electric-like halo that surrounds her (typical to the treatment of solarization in photography).

The history of the zoetrope device intrigued me. Its original use was to sequence still images and spin the device to animate them. It is only until the viewer chooses to no longer engage that the zoetrope stops. The use of the zoetrope acts as a metaphor for the illumination of the interior of our being. My intention in using it was to show that once it is put into motion, the life-size interior existence of self is illuminated, including the events or moments of struggle that stay with us throughout our lives. The events that shape us are brought to the foreground and explain the layers necessary for the creation of who we are or become.

This is the body multiple. The focus of this work is the area between subject/object and the blur of the existence: interior-exterior relation. With the viewer’s participation the interior becomes enacted.

Jouissance is a super 8 film that runs in a continual loop. For me the choice of color and gesture speak of the “ecstatic” in this film. My preference is to have the piece loop on a film projector; it is to be viewed small, approximately projected 6 × 6 inches visually encouraging an intimate interaction with the work. Reading Marcel Proust and my interactions with Julia Kristeva directly inspired the film. Julia Kristeva writes, “Proust can give us in a glimpse of the way a psychic life can possess and expose its own unprecedented complexity: a life is at once painful and ecstatic, sensual and spiritual, erotic and pensive.” The ability to find the ecstatic for me is directly related to understanding oneself and one’s connection to all. The expression of this in written form is difficult for me; the piece Jouissance is important because through it I found the ecstatic.

To film Jouissance, I painted the wall of my studio robin’s egg blue, a color representing the divine, the color of the robe that the statuettes of Madonna are swathed in from my childhood. The film is of my two hands, palms facing one another. My hands start out slowly moving up and down with a small amount of space between them. The pace increases, and as it does the space between the hands disappears and they become one; the pace then begins to slow down and the hands begin to move slightly away from one another; and the film’s loop repeats. At first it is the tension or the existence of the space that is illuminated, but once the hands touch it is the ecstatic that is illuminated.

PHOTOGRAPHS © KRISTINE GRANGER; FROM HER ZOETROPE INSTALLATION HAUNTING.

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PHOTOGRAPHS © KRISTINE GRANGER; STILLS FROM VIDEO WORK JOUISSANCE.

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