What I have noticed about my own relationship to photography after recently spending time looking at my archive, is the acute awareness of the private narrative of my own life going on elsewhere, outside of the frame. Those photos that I consider more successful are encoded with psychic markers and contain everything I need to know to gain access to this life between the photographs.
Photographs are both time capsule and time machine which can, on an images’ contemplation, transport me back to that initial experience, landscape, person or feeling and, if I have been true to my own vision when making the photograph, it stages authentically, the psychological and emotional conditions which brought about the making of the picture in the first place. The feedback between myself and this distilled object, this photograph, is continuously being mentally reframed with each viewing. The image remains stable in its representation, but myself, as its viewer and author, is in a state of continuous flux across time and it is this feedback which informs my present self of itself in it’s ever changing state.
You describe the relationship between time, memory and the photograph very nicely.
ReplyDeleteWe always filter what we see through the experience and memory of what we have seen by choosing to cut out a part of reality. Time can be a useful method to bring new lives to images, always revealing new aspects.
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