A&HA 5005 Visual Art Research Methodology
Autumn 2009
Professor: Dr. Sullivan
UNDERSTANDING PHOTOGRAPHIC TIME IN THE REALM OF VISUAL CULTURE: THE
ATTRIBUTES OF TIME IN PHOTOGRAPHY AS SEEN THROUGH EXPOSURE
by
Jun Gao
December 2009
0
All photographs share the same flaw: Lack of time.
David Hockney
Personal Context
In my studio, there are many cameras sitting on a shelf. The types of cameras range from
various formats of manual film cameras to digital cameras. These cameras are testimony to my
obsession with new photographic technologies. However, after years of keeping up with the
photographic industry developments, when I sat down in front of my cameras, I found that I lost
something. I was not sure what I had lost. It was not because that I have paid significant amounts
of money on the equipment. Later on, when I organized a pile of camera instruction manuals, I
realized that I could not say I really knew all the cameras I had bought, since I had not used
many functions that had attracted me to buy them. I did not know what possibilities I could gain
from those functions that I had missed.
I was not only obsessed with cameras, but also was passionate about photographs and
visiting photography exhibitions. However, a few years ago I found that my enthusiasm about
photography gradually cooled down. I could not experience excitement from seeing and reading
photographs anymore. In term of printing quality, although there were more and more excellently
taken and print photographs appeared in galleries and photographic albums, I found that the
photography was constrained by something. At the time, I could not figure out the cause.
It was a delightful moment in 2004 when I was reading some archives about the birth of
photography; I realized that I found a possible answer to resolve my previous puzzle. Louis
Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple was the key. The photograph was taken in late 1838 or early
1
1839 in Paris. In this photograph, a person in the lower left corner was the first human that
appeared in a history of photography. The Boulevard du Temple was a busy street; however,
because the exposure time was over ten minutes, the traffic was moving too fast to be captured
by the daguerreotype. Comparing to the relatively swift moving traffic and pedestrians, the
person’s motionless pose was long enough to be registered onto the daguerreotype, as he was
having his shoes polished. In order to revive and represent the reality and realistically visualize
the memories or experiences of the past, photographers, scientists, manufactures, and viewers
were keen on accelerating the exposure time. Achieving instantaneous exposure and providing
better visual quality within the short exposure time became the photographic industry’s major
goal.
When I compared the Boulevard du Temple with some modern and contemporary
photographs of metropolitans, I found that the ten minutes exposure, indeed, erased the crowd.
This is unlike what we see in real life, but the image presents a pure structure of the city, which
we normally cannot see. Thus, the pursuit of instantaneous exposure time makes us miss other
possibilities that photography can provide. Hence, the relation between time and speed gradually
became a key that could lead me to find the answers to my previous dilemma. Why not make the
exposure time as slow as we can? What can we get from the longer exposure time? Does the
result that instantaneous exposure time presents provide us with what we see and experience?
With all the questions and curiosity, I initiated my long-term exposure photography
experiment to expose one single sheet of film up to days, months, and years. The results of this
practice were rewarding and inspiring. The projects assist me to understand there are more
2
possibilities in photography that we may discover. Especially, there are many avenues which can
lead us to have a deeper understanding of time. Notably, What I am going to discuss here focuses
on time and speed in photography in general as seen through a cultural, philosophical, and
psychological window instead of merely discussing a history of photography.
Problem
The time in a so-called real-time photograph is not the real time. We see representations
of time, but we cannot see time itself (Sartre, 1956), which is invisible, since “we only see what
we look at" (Berger, 1977, p.7). We can only see the present; however, we produce
representations to indicate the past; unfortunately, we cannot see the future because “what we see
is brought within our reach” (Berger, 1977, p.7). Thus, the representations of time vary only in
past tense.
Due to its technical and mechanical nature, photography is generally accepted as the
representation and testimony of the past (Susan Sontag, 1977), which does show the presence in
a certain space and time. Walter Benjamin (1977) discussed that photography transmitted human
everyday life onto the plates of photographs.
On Thursday October 29, 2009, Jon Fein, the director of a documentary film entitled
Memory and Objects, did an experiment with audience in his presentation at Teachers College.
He asked “If there was a fire in your house, what object(s) do you decide to bring with you? Aha,
photographs, family photographs, and wedding photographs…” According to his research and
projects, he emphasized that human beings always project, entrust, or transfer meanings to
objects. He mentioned that he had done this test with many audiences. Photographs were the
3
most selected objects according to the results of previous tests, since photographs were the
proofs and memories of one’s existence in a specific moment of one’s life. In other words,
photographs hold the credibility of one’s identity. Roland Barthes (1981) stated that “every
photograph is a certificate of presence” (p.87). Thus, many people consider photographs as the
representations of “undeniable reality” (Thompson, 2003, p.14).
Photographs used as testimony to verify what happened in the past normally took around
a fraction of a second. We understand the images taken within the short-term exposure because
we can infer the relationship between what we look at in a photograph and the existing
knowledge and our experiences. John Berger emphasizes that “the way we see things is affected
by what we know or what we believe”, “each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth
is turning away from it” (1977, p.7). To a great extent, the fast exposure photographs can offer
viewers the information that matches their experiences and knowledge and supply source that
can nurture their memories.
According to a history of photography, as seen through a lens of time, the exposure time
was developed faster and faster in order to assume that verisimilitude (Eder, 1978; Newhall,
1982). The majority of photographs’ exposure times are transient. (Photography became only
about moment, especially after the birth of film-the moving images, which present illusions of
images in time flux.) Hence, the notion of momentary time exerts a subtle influence on people’s
understanding of time in photography. Consequently, instantaneous exposures dominate
photographic practices.
The birth of photography was during the same epoch of the first Industrial Revolution.
4
The history of the development of photography is evolving along with the history from then until
now. The priorities for both the Industrial Revolutions and the Information Revolution are speed
and efficiency. To accelerate speed extensively permeates into the domains of most societies. The
phenomena of social, scientific, technical, and cultural development along modern and
contemporary history, in a way, hold significant influence over the development of photography.
The camera as a technical invention did not avoid social trends. The photographic
industry constantly focuses on providing better optical equipment and faster light sensitive media
in order to improve exposure time and speed up the time of acquiring images. Undeniably,
technical improvements, indeed, save countless seconds for people to possess representational
images. For instance, the painter of the façade of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, requested by
John Ruskin, spent six hundred days to finish the commission. In the 1830s, a photographer
could only spend one hour or two to create a picture of the site, including setting up the
equipment, making an exposure, and processing the negatives (Thompson, 2003). Nowadays, the
process of having the image is just a fraction of a second. Comparing to conventional drawing,
photography’s efficient way of producing the representation of realities is a phenomenal advance.
From a social developmental point of view, the notion of time in photography, thus, gallops
along with one dimensional enthusiasm, pursuing high-speed time. This one dimensional view of
time in photography perfectly matches the rhythm of the Industrial Revolution through
Information Revolution. There are numerous possibilities for high-speed time exposures that
appeal to photographic image-makers and their consumers to explore further excitements in even
faster time.
5
However, the notion of instantaneous time in photography causes similar symptom in
other contemporary technical realms. The symptom is obsession with speed. The term obsession
here means that the faster speed the contemporary technology can achieve, the more
opportunities and things we are going to lose (Virilio, 1991), but we continue to develop this
technology. For instance, some technologies are that we use only some of its functions. When its
more advanced or new version become available, which happens more frequently and prompt
than before in the age of information technology, we move on to the new version of the
technology to start use some of its new functions or certain similar function that what we had.
The rest of the functions that we did not use will be gradually forgotten or ignored. Thus, some
of the opportunities that could have been provided by the unrecognized or unused functions of
certain technology or machinery will have disappeared (Virilio, 1991).
The sequela of the dominant notion of instantaneity in photography is that major
photographic practices constrain the photographic images within certain experiences, which
share the same characteristic called frozen image. People appreciate these frozen images; one of
the reasons is that they are considered a form of graphic art (Coe, 1976; Lemagny &Rouillé,
1987; Newhall, 1982; Rosenblum, 2007), which has the gene of drawing and painting. The most
significant example is that one of the inventors of photography, Talbot called photographs the
‘light drawing.’ First, a photograph has a frame just like drawings and paintings. Moreover, most
drawings and paintings present only momentary images, frozen images (Berger, 1982; Hockney,
1988). In most drawings and paintings, the time is always still. Although there are some artists,
such as those within Cubism, who experiment with bringing time into painting, representations
6
of time are not fluid. The duration of time in such paintings, in fact, is imaginative time
dependent on the perception and imagination of the drawings or paintings1. Thus, existing
conventions of seeing drawings and paintings are transplanted to visual photographs. Therefore,
we accept the frozen images in photographic practices and even appreciate them.
However, “the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled”
(Berger, 1977, p.7). In photographs, we see the world through a camera’s eye, its lens. The
camera’s optical eye is not the equal of human naked eyes. It can see what we cannot see and it
cannot see what we can see. For instance, when we see, our sights always have focus. In certain
ways, for example in a large detailed scene of a landscape photograph, one could say that the
exposure time is equal to the twinkling of an eye, there is no specific focus on a photograph; by
moving our focus around the photograph, we can see more details than our naked eye can see in
such quick time. That is why sometimes photographs are used as supplementary materials to
assist observations. In addition, some cameras can also see phenomena which are beyond our
abilities, such as cameras used in capturing high-speed imagery, cameras used for microscope
studies, and cameras used for telescope studies. On the other hand, cameras do not have the
ability to see what we can see. For example, we have two eyes and cameras only have one. Our
view is much more flexible and wider than a camera’s view, since the view from a camera is
always relatively fixed. The most significant difference is that our seeing is relatively subjective;
on the contrary, a camera’s seeing is relatively objective although it has to be operated by a
1
The distinction between the time in photography and the time in drawing and painting is that the time in photography is the
objective being captured by the light-sensitive material through a photographer’s operation; on the contrary, the time in
drawing and painting is the subjective creation from the artist.
7
subjective mind. We operate the camera based on our desire, knowledge, and experience. “Yet
the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight” (Berger, 1977, p.7).
David Hockney (1994) claims that the longer the transient in photography can be, the
more we can experience. Time’s nature is in flux, not temporal (Heidegger, 1972; Sartre, 1956).
In contrast to regular short-term exposure photography, long-term exposure photography can
record the duration of time instead of a moment of time. The information offered by such
representations of time reveals what we experience but we cannot really see. For instance, in a
short-term exposure photograph or merely seeing with our naked eye, we can see that sun is just
an extreme bright spot in the sky; however, in a long-term exposure photograph, we can see the
movement of the sun during a given duration of time. Such knowledge we gained from long-term
exposure cannot match our experience, memory, and particular knowledge that possess. Thus,
the long-term exposure challenges the perception of time in photography, our belief, and existing
knowledge.
Time in photography is intricate and multi-layered. There are four different strata of time
in photography, which are the time itself as being, the photographic materials’ time, the time
used by photographers, and a photograph’s viewers’ understandings and interpretations of time.
Heidegger (1972) disserts that “Time-a matter, but nothing temporal” (p.4). Sartre also has a
similar interpretation of time, he expresses that time’s nature is flux, its totality, transient is not
time. John Berger considers that photography is a means of quotation. All photographs have been
taken out of a continuity(Berger & Mohr, 1982, p. 91). He also suggests that the photographic
materials are vital components of the photographic time. “In a photograph time is uniform: every
8
part of the image has been subjected to a chemical process of uniform duration. In the process of
revelation all parts were equal”(Berger & Mohr, 1982, p. 95). Berger’s discussion below gives us
a comprehensive explanation of how time in a photograph is perceived and interpreted by its
viewers. Although it is lengthy, it is worthwhile to cite it.
A photograph preserves a moment of time and prevents it being effaced by the
supersession of further moments. In this respect photographs might be compared to images
stored in the memory. Yet there is a fundamental difference: whereas remembered images
are residue of continuous experience, a photograph isolated the appearances of a
disconnected instant.
And in life, meaning is not instantaneous. Meaning is discovered in what connects,
and cannot exist without development. Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no
meaning. Facts, information, do not in themselves constitute meaning. Facts can be fed
into a computer and become factors in a calculation. No meaning, however, comes out of
computers, for when we give meaning to an event, that meaning is a response, not only to
the known, but also to the unknown: meaning and mystery are inseparable, and neither can
exist without the passing of time. Certainty may be instantaneous; doubt requires duration;
meaning is born of the two. An instant photographed can only acquire meaning insofar as
the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. When we find a photograph
meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future.(Berger & Mohr, 1982, p. 89)
9
Research Question
Given the limitations of understandings of photographic time investigated through
archival research and phenomenological inquiry, why does this kind of notion of time become
the mainstream idea that directs photographic practices and perception of time?
Sub-Questions
From an Art History Perspective:
Given a history of the technical development of photographic practices in general, what is
the role that the notion of photographic time plays in the understandings and interpretations of
photographs?
From a Philosophical Perspective:
Given the miscellaneous phenomena of time, which is one of the key topics of the history
of philosophy, what philosophical insights upon perceiving time might be revealed through the
process of exploring photographic practices?
From a Social and Cultural Perspective:
Given the research process and practices in long-term exposure photography, what social
and cultural insights about contemporary practice of technology might be revealed through the
rediscovery and application of traditional photographic material?
From a Psychological Perspective:
Given the evolving history of the development of photographic technology, what
psychological motivations about pursuing instantaneous exposure time might be detected
through the comparison between the virtuality in photographic practice and actuality in reality?
10
From a Pedagogical Perspective:
Given the phenomena of different kinds of photographic time represented by diverse
photographic practices, what pedagogical input can motivate contemporary college studio art
practice to analyze and criticize the process and results of their photographic practices?
Research Method
This research is a combination of historical, phenomenological, and philosophical
investigation of the understanding of time in photography, within the context of visual culture
and is set to debate existing understandings of time in photographic practice. Archival research,
phenomenological inquiry, and my own long-term exposure photographic experiments as
participatory observational research will be used as the methods of data collection for the
research.
The composition of the archival research includes two components. One component is
reviewing literature related to the concept of time in photography, visual culture, and philosophy.
The other component is an examination of archives connected with the history of the technical
development of photographic practices in general. Archives are not merely considered as
historical testimony in this study; they are also employed as foundations for debate between
different notions of time in photography. The data collected from archival research will build the
base of a conceptual framework that deals with the diverse perceptions of photographic time.
Various visual representations of photographic time through a history of photography will be
interrogated by the phenomenological inquiry. The body of participatory observational research
consists of the working process and resulting examination of my long-term exposure
photographic practices. It will provide direct and first-hand data that can reduce the chance of
manipulating or misinterpreting data.
Source
For this study, the source of information consists of literature and visual art practices. The
seminal literature includes diverse philosophical discourses about time, critiques and studies of
11
photography, visual culture studies as they relate to photographic images, and literature of psychology as
in the psychology of seeing and neuroscience. In addition, the documents of photographic technology and
technology in general will be a compositional portion of the construct of selected literature. The
photographic practices comprise representative photographs from different epochs along a history of
photography. Books, photography albums, exhibition catalogues, digital photographic reproductions,
essays and reviews from periodicals and journals, artists’ notes and statement, and artists’ or theorists’
interviews will be read as primary sources.
Data Collection
The conceptual basis of this study will be shaped by philosophical concepts about time by
Heidegger, Bergson, Sartre, Virilio, and Deleuze, and cultural critiques about photography by Barthes,
Benjamin, Berger, and Sontag. In particular, this study will borrow from arguments, such as the sense of
time as duration and flux from Bergson and Sartre and the concept of time and speed from Virilio reveal
different dimensions of time. Barthes, Benjamin, Berger, and Sontag’s analysis of photography disclose
various attributes of photography and photographic time from political, social, cultural, aesthetic, and
philosophical perspectives.
An extensive archival investigation of a history of photography and technical
development of photography will provide insights of how people’s concepts deal with time,
speed, and light develop. It also might expose the structure of the motivation that led to the
mainstream phenomenon of photographic development. Moreover, information from social and
cultural critiques about modern and contemporary technology will draw a blueprint of how
socio-cultural forces interact with photography.
Photographic images in the context of the technical development of photography, which
are collected from books, exhibition catalogues, and digital archives, will visually interpret how
the ideas of time are examined in practice and how the results of the practices, in turn, influence
the development of photography. The collection of the photographs will cross various genres in
order to regard photography as a whole instead of focusing on a genre in particular.
Information that I will collect from my long-term exposure photographic practice will
12
serve as the data which can debate with or against the existing concepts of time reflected by the
photographic archives. The process and results of long-term exposure photographic practice will
be recorded and transferred to narrative written documents.
Data Analysis
This study will undertake an interdisciplinary and interpretive approach to analysis and
interpret data as it relates to the concepts of time from various perspectives, such as
philosophical perspectives, socio-cultural perspectives, phenomenological perspectives,
psychological perspectives, and technological perspectives. All images that are included in the
research will be deconstructed from historical and socio-cultural points of view so as to seek
ingrained notions of time, hidden notions of time, ignored notions of time, and latent possibilities
for exploring and expanding the notion of time. Frankfurt School scholar, Walter Benjamin, has
extensive and suggestive critiques of nineteenth century industrial cultural phenomena, and his
archival research methodology is applicable to research of contemporary art practices. Based on
Benjamin’s concepts, John Berger analyzed photography and mechanical reproductions from the
perspective of how we see and perceive images and of how images influence our perceptions.
Both the writers used archives and Marxist dialectic analyses to interpret photography as a
socio-cultural production. Roland Barthes uses both structuralist and post-structuralist methods
and employs narrative and interpretive approaches to interpret photographs and the structure of
photography in a historical, socio-cultural, and political context. In terms of my data analysis, I
will borrow from the framework of archival analysis, dialectic analysis, and structural analysis to
interpret existing concepts of photographic time in order to uncover latent senses of time in
photography.
13
References
Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida: reflections on photography. New York: Hill and
Wang/Noonday Press.
Benjamin, W. (1977). A Short History of Photograph. In A. Trachtenberg (Ed.) Classic Essays on
Photography. (pp. 199-217). New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books.
Berger, J. (1977). Ways of seeing. London; New York, N.Y.: British Broadcasting Corp. ; Penguin
Books.
Berger, J., & Mohr, J. (1982). Another way of telling (1st American Ed.). New York: Pantheon.
Coe, B. (1976). The birth of photography: the story of the formative years, 1800-1900. London:
Ash & Grant.
Eder, J. M. (1978). History of photography. New York: Dover Publications.
Heidegger, M. (1972). On time and being ([1st ed.). New York: Harper & Row.
Hockney, D., & Joyce, P. (1988). Hockney on photography: conversations with Paul Joyce.
London: Cape.
Lemagny, J.-C., & Rouillé, A. (1987). A History of photography: social and cultural perspectives.
Cambridge; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Newhall, B. (1982). The history of photography: from 1839 to the present (Completely rev. and
enl. ed.). New York, Boston: Museum of Modern Art; Distributed by New York Graphic
Society Books.
Rosenblum, N. (2007). A world history of photography (4th ed.). New York: Abbeville Press
Publishers.
14
Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and nothingness; an essay on phenomenological ontology. New York,:
Philosophical Library.
Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. New York, N.Y.: Dell Pub. Co.
Thompson, J. L. (2003). Truth and photography: notes on looking and photographing. Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee.
Virilio, P., & Beitchman, P. (1991). The aesthetics of disappearance (1st English ed.). New York,
N.Y.: Semiotext(e).
15
Index
Louis Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple. 1838. Daguerreotype.
Camille Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning. 1897. Oil on canvas. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.
16
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare St. Lazare. 1932. Silver Gelatin Print. 17 1/2 x 11 7/10
inches
17
Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai). 1993. Silver dye bleach transparency in light
box, 87-1/4 x 148-1/2 inches Tate, London. Purchased with the assistance of the Patrons of New
Art through the Tate Gallery Foundation and from the National Art Collections Fund.
Jeff Wall, Milk. 1984. Silver dye bleach transparency in light box, 74-1/2 x 90-1/4 inches. The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
18
Jun Gao, The Birth of a House. 2009. 4x5 Color Film, C-Print. 24inx20in.
19