Sunday, December 30, 2007

Time & Matter


The march of days, the spin of the earth - no matter how I may try to deny it, photographs are always about bits of stuff transfixed in intervals of time. This is true for photographs in a way that is not true for paintings. Every photograph is of a specific place over a given span of time and is unalterably connected to that moment. A painter may paint Adam and Eve and we accept it. When a photographer tries, the resulting picture is likely to look like two naked actors in the park? And this fixation in time means that history treats photographs differently than it treats paintings. What does all this suggest about how differently these two media communicate something universal?