Slow Time...

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I've written about 'time' in photographs on many previous occasions, and at the risk of, well, who gives one? Here I go again. I think I referred back to that glass plate negative I chanced upon and the post I wrote about it, the other day; and the speculative narratives that the image throws up each time I view the resulting positive image. However, on my usual YouTube trawl this morning, I came upon the following video: Lost in Time, posted by a German photographer, Markus Hofstätter, which outlines the process by which he managed to extract images from a ninety-year-old roll of exposed 127-format film, by a devious and rather convoluted mixture of chemical and digital processes. The results are not high art, but they are truly remarkable in much the same way as my own accidental, eBay find. These are indeed ghosts from nearly a century ago, unseen until recently by the coincidence of happenstance and the persistence of an individual.

But the kicker is, that at the time of posting the video, it turned out that the person - who must have been a child at the time - who owned the very camera that the film was discovered in, was still alive. I recommend viewing the above-linked video: it's well worth investing seven-and-a-half minutes of your time in so doing. Particularly in chemical photography, time is central to every part of the process, from the moment the shutter button is pressed, to the viewing of the final image itself: there is real time compressed at several levels within the image, as well as the implied time that interpretive, assumed narrative brings with it. In no way can photography truly be said to be an instantaneous process, and in fact, Markus' digital post-processing of the smears of reality that he elicited from the roll of film chemically, are testimony to that. I'll post more on time and the image as I go: there is a much longer form piece in the offing, if I ever get my arse in gear to complete it.

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