Exploring time-based works in photography

Photography is very clever at depicting things as they never appear. The slow emulsions of early photographic processes turn Paris and London into ghost towns, void of people and all transient activity: nothing to do with what either city ever looked like.  Eddie Adams’ 1968 photograph of General Loan executing a man in Vietnam freezes the action after the bullet enters and before it exits the victim’s head.  The bullet entered Nguyen Van Lem’s head over forty years ago and in Adam’s photograph, it still rests there: nothing to do with what the execution looked like. In my family’s vacation photos, we are all lined up shoulder-to-shoulder in front of some point of interest (or the station wagon): nothing to do with what the vacation was, merely how the vacation was photographed.

Most photographs successfully avoid the truth and fascinate me because their lies are so plausible. I am more curious to see what a photograph can materially be than what a photograph can depict. I am trying to discover more than control and consider photography itself my principle subject matter. With different subjects and diverse techniques, my photographs are constructed from expanded or compressed traces of time. These images, made with some combination of time-lapse, slow exposure, successive doses of light, or prolonged development, largely replace photography’s struggle to document with photography’s power to invent. Published in 2002, Lyle Rexer's book Photography's Antiquarian Avant-garde situates my work with other contemporary and historical photographers working  in both mystical and material ways, "letting the chemistry of the emulsion register chance and time, turning Talbot's ‘pencil of nature’ into a paintbrush."

I am researching time-based works in photography.  Every month, I will post the work of a new artist, sometimes with interviews and more info. Feel free to contact me if you or any one you know is also interested in time-based works. The above piece is of Franz Jantzen, photographing a fallen tree in the woods.  Jantzen, an artist living in Washington DC, has been exploring photography for over thirty years. Since 2004, he has been making digital assemblages by combining hundreds of still images of subjects such as a bookstore floor, a conservator's workspace, a crate of plates and dishes.  Though the images resemble aerial photography, Jantzen actually holds the camera waist or chest high and first dismantles his chosen subject by photographing fragmented selections, then reassembles the puzzle pieces into a new whole whose seductive coherency splinters upon closer inspection.  This artist - part detective, part archeologist, perhaps part mad scientist - produces stunning and complex images that stretch and bend a viewer's notion of time and space.