Image Time

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Untitled 2020 - Kel Harvey
    If I can return to my post of yesterday, I referred to the idea that a single frame photographic image can somehow have 'time'. Self-evidently, a single frame of movie film or video footage is a discrete step in a passage of time: space bound to the temporal by definition. Whereas, in the isolated world of the single photographic image there is a sense of narrative that stands outwith the subject apparently depicted. Apparently, simply because without personal connection or familiarity with that depicted, without cultural or social context, without textual reference: without placement in the world from which it was originally abstracted, it exists simply as it is - semantically, it is only qualified by its' place in the wider history of image making. So without any obvious narrative underpinning to reference it to, the natural tendency of the human mind is to attempt to order and patternise the chaotic into the familiar. To make sense of the mysterious. To codify and explain.
    In photographs where the intent is to record: snapshots, documentary images, news reportage et al., the context in which the photograph is taken plus the assumed cultural language of whatever genre(s) it represents, restricts the set of meanings that the observer can draw from.
    A photograph without the obvious intent to record an event in time somehow transcends the moment and develops a narrative space where the observer fills in the before and after, participating in a dialogue with the image in order to codify it - to try and make sense of the mystery. To mythologise it. To bring it into the realm of art and separate it from the mundane.
    When I was at college, there was another photographer working there - Paddy Shanahan. He was in the year below me, but he had already developed a strong visual language of his own. His modus operandi was relatively simple: use the lowest ISO film available (Kodak Panatomic X) in a medium-format camera on a locked-down tripod at night in a public space such as a railway station - always with strong architectural forms and tones. Using the smallest aperture - f32 on the 6x6 camera he used, his exposures were measured in hours. Consequently, the only things that appeared in the finished pieces were the building structures - all time compressed into one, dense frame. Beautiful. His images had 'time'.
    I revisited the technique years later when I was teaching a night class in photography and took the class out to try something that none of them would ever have considered doing: compressing time into a single image, to subvert the instantaneousness of the photographic norm. Alongside far more 'famous' photographers than he, Paddy was an inspiration and a mentor.

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn't attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don't see.  - Emmet Gowin

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