Hinting at an experience of time in still photography

Abstract

Often photography is seen as the medium ‘par excellence’ to freeze time, to capture the moment. But is photography really this still-medium in contrast to movies as the moving-medium? The photographic technique known as the strip or slit technique seems to lead to a different reading of the photographic still. Rather than seeing the image as a framed, cut-out of reality, it invites us to look through it, read it and feel the different changes within one image. Instead of holding the photo camera still, the strip-photographer moves the camera and the film inside it, to make a time-based composition that is represented in the photographic images. In doing so the strip image, rather than being one moment in a possible series of many (as is the case for the snapshot), shows us the dynamic change over time of camera and film.

Keywords:

• photography
• strip-photography
• time
• experience of time
• time and the image