Turning a Photograph
June 17, 2010
I am drawn to photographs that acknowledge the instant of their conception.
Consider for a moment that time is a three-dimensional stream moving in one direction, and a photograph is a (nearly) two-dimensional slice of that stream. As the stream continues and we move through it, that slice is carried “downstream” with us, and we view it from one direction. Now imagine we were to somehow turn ourselves around to view the “back” of this slice – what would we see? Would it be blank void, like the back of most photographs? Would we simply gaze “upstream” in time? What if on the back of that slice is another image – an image of the making of that slice?
I am drawn to photographs that make me want to turn them around.
Susan Sontag writes, “the force of a photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces.” In other words, photographs are slices of the stream we carry along with us and view repeatedly. Some of the most compelling photographs are those that force us to imagine the stream in both directions. An image of Timothy O’Sullivan’s springs to mind. It shows his wagon with four horses on a trail between two sand dunes. Stretching from the wagon to the bottom of the photograph are O’Sullivan’s footprints. What is remarkable about this image is how it unmistakably forces us to imagine the photographer walking from wagon to camera, and powerfully brings to mind an image of the photograph being taken. It is in the strongest sense a real (not imagined) scene. It says, “this happened, and this is how it happened.”
O’Sullivan’s image nearly turns itself over for us.
TMW
