Modern Time

Photography and Temporality

Bibliographic Data

ID12947331
AuthorsKris Belden-Adams (0000-0001-9344-6025, City University of New York, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume5
Issue3
Pages25-42
Publication date2009-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe International Journal of Technology Knowledge and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1832-3669 • E-ISSN: 2835-0391
PublisherCommon Ground Research Networks (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.18848/1832-3669/cgp/v05i03/55994
OpenAlexW2339433157
LanguageEN
References cited80

This dissertation explores the fluid relationship of photography to time.Many theorists have noted that photography has a distinctive manner of representing temporality.Roland Barthes, for example, wrote that the photograph has a peculiar capacity to represent the past in the present, and thus to imply the passing of time in general. 1 As a consequence, Barthes argued, all photographs speak of the inevitability of our own death in the future.Moreover, he linked photography's peculiar temporality to its capacity for a certain kind of realism:-false on the level of perception, true on the level of time.‖ 2 Barthes's analysis poses a challenge to all commentators on photographywhat exactly is photography's relationship to time, and by extension, to reality?This dissertation addresses that two-part question by analyzing in detail a sample of understudied vernacular photographic practices.Rather than provide a comprehensive, and necessarily incomplete, study of every possible way in which photography can relate to time, this study instead focuses on a number of in-depth 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).2 Ibid, 115.Chapter One: Picturing ̳Modern Time' Who shall hold [time], and fix it, that it be settled awhile, and awhile catch the glory of that everfixed Eternity, and compare it with the times which are never fixed, and see that it cannot be compared.-St.Augustine of Hippo 3The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our ̳natural magic,' and may be fixed forever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy

Temporality · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory