Photography and Duration: Time Exposure and Time-Image
Sandra Plummer
The photograph proceeds by means of the lens to the taking of a veritable luminous impression in light – to a mold....But photography is a feeble technique in the sense that its instantaneity compels it to capture time only piecemeal. The cinema...makes a molding of the object as it exists in time and, furthermore, makes an imprint of the duration of the object.
— André Bazin [1]
There is in fact no such thing as an instantaneous photograph. All photographs are time exposures, of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time.
— John Szarkowski [2]
[1] Photography's capacity to freeze and preserve time has engendered much debate. Photography consists of a tracing of time; the duration of the photograph's exposure time (in conjunction with light) determines the resulting image. Peter Wollen begins his essay 'Fire and Ice' by asserting that the 'discussion of photography is dominated by the concept of time. Photographs appear as devices for stopping time and preserving fragments of the past, like flies in amber'. [3] André Bazin's characterisation of photography in 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image' is similar in the emphasis on the medium's capacity to preserve the past 'enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber'. [4] Many writers agree on photography's ability to stop time, but the question of the duration of that stoppage is less clear. Wollen proposes that photographic images may represent duration - 'the fact that images may themselves appear as punctual, virtually without duration, does not mean that the situations that they represent lack any quality of duration'. [5] For Bazin, however, photography comprised 'instantaneity' and was compelled to 'capture time only piecemeal' in contrast to the durational capacity of film. Theorisations of photography thus often focus on a comparative analysis with film and photography is invariably found to be lacking. My approach is a kind of inversion of Bazin; rather than searching for the ontology of film in the photographic image, I propose exploring the ontology of the photograph through a philosophical analysis borrowed from film. This ontological exploration will comprise a consideration of the durational capacity of the photograph via a filmic account of duration.
[2] This paper will consider the duration of the photographic image via Deleuze's account of cinema. The philosophy of time was important throughout Deleuze's project, but the cinema books are most pertinent to an analysis of the duration of the creative image. I take all photographs to be durational, but propose that this is most evident in the long exposure. Beginning from the perspective of John Szarkowski (that 'all photographs are time exposures'), I will consider how the long exposure stretches the photograph's 'discrete parcel of time'. [6] The first part of this paper explores accounts of photographic and cinematic temporality. Deleuze's analysis of Bergson's theses on movement will be examined as a prerequisite for a consideration of duration. The second part of this paper considers Gary Schneider's Durational Portraits as a 'time exposure' and as a 'time-image'.
Photography and Cinema: Movement, Time and Duration
[3] In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes characterises the photograph as 'that has been' - depicting what is always already assigned to the past. [7] However, for Barthes the photograph may also be seen to project into the future; it not only tells us what has been but what will be. Discussing Alexander Gardner's photograph of Lewis Payne in his prison cell (soon to be hanged for murder), Barthes insists that this photograph not only represents the past but points to the future:
I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future (CL 96).
For Barthes all photographs present the future death of the sitter. It is the knowledge of the future of this photograph – of the imminent death of the young subject that introduces poignancy to the image: time here becomes a lacerating punctum. [8]
[4] The act of posing for the camera also highlights photography's capacity for an anterior future. For Barthes the experience of being photographed provokes a feeling of inauthenticity whereby the sitter anticipates and enacts the future image they will become. The sitter thereby imitates themselves and their future representation. Yet while the sitter is propelled into the future (anticipating the resulting image), that image can only ever represent the past. For Barthes the causal relation between the sitter and the photograph demands a period of stillness where time becomes unhinged: 'I project the present photograph's immobility upon the past shot and it is this arrest which constitutes the pose' (CL 78). The pose is central to photography and crucial to the distinction between photography and cinema:
In the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole (CL 78).
Barthes reads the enforced stillness demanded by the camera as symbolic of photography's link to death. The resulting photograph completes the sense of alienation induced by posing: 'I have become Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person' (CL 14). Commenting on the long exposures required by early photographic techniques, Barthes compares the experience to a surgical operation. Constrained in a clamp-like device, the sitter was quite literally captured for and by the camera. Barthes describes such a device as 'a kind of prosthesis' – the headrest a 'pedestal of the statue I would become' (CL 13). The sitter not only endures discomfort but the experience provokes a feeling of alienation where the sitter is transformed from 'subject into object' (CL 13). The notion of the pose epitomises the essential stillness of photography. [9] As David Campany has indicated, there is a similarity between the act of posing for the photograph and the nature of photography itself: 'when we pose we make ourselves into a frozen image. We make ourselves into a photograph, in anticipation of being photographed'. [10]
[5] Barthes's analysis of the sitter's experience of the unhinging of time resonates with Deleuze's account of the cinematic image whereby time splits into two 'dissymmetrical jets' – one towards the past, the other towards the future: one preserves the past while the other makes the present pass on. [11] The distinction that Barthes draws between still and moving images - between passing or posing before the lens - is also echoed in Deleuze. Deleuze's classification of animation as cinematic is based on its opposition to the pose:
If it belongs fully to the cinema, this is because the drawing no longer constitutes a pose or a completed figure, but the description of a figure which is always in the process of being formed or dissolving (C1 5).
Patricia Pisters has written that 'Deleuze doesn't seem to be bothered by the unrealistic or unfaithful qualities of animation'; it is the 'continuity of movement' that determines that animation is cinematic. [12] For Deleuze animation consists of representations of moving figures in a state of flux. The cartoon film 'does not give us a figure described in a unique moment, but the continuity of the movement which describes the figure' (C1 5). Even the cell cartoon composed of sketches is cinematic because the frames from which it is composed consist of 'any-instant-whatevers'. The individual frames of the animation do not constitute finished poses (or privileged instants) so much as a figure in the act of being formed. In contrast to the pose that grounds the still photograph, any-instant-whatevers constitute a passing before the camera.
[6] For Deleuze cinema reconstitutes movement through 'any-instant-whatevers' that are selected not as privileged instants but in order to 'create an impression of continuity' (C1 5). The notion of any-instant-whatevers originate in Bergson's account of instantaneous photography [13] and occurs in Deleuze's discussion of Bergson's theses on movement. Deleuze begins Cinema 1 with a commentary on Bergson's theses on movement and this analysis provides a philosophical framework for Deleuze's approach to film; it is also crucial to an understanding of duration.
Deleuze's Account of Bergson's Theses on Movement
[7] Deleuze examines three types of images in relation to Bergson's theses on movement: instantaneous images ('immobile sections of movement'); movement-images ('mobile sections') and time-images. Bergson's first thesis is that movement is indivisible and distinct from space and that you cannot reconstitute movement in space (and time) through immobile images. By adding time or space you invariably miss the movement. Bergson's second thesis is a development of the first – that there are two methods of producing the illusion of movement: the ancient and the modern. Bergson's third thesis is that movement as a translation into space affects the whole: movement expresses change and thus duration.
[8] Bergson's first thesis on movement (First Thesis: Movement and Instant) is summed up by Deleuze as 'movement is distinct from the space covered. Space covered is past, movement is present' (C1 1). This thesis according to Deleuze contains another proposition – 'you cannot reconstitute movement with positions in space or instants in time: that is, with immobile sections' (C1 1). While space is 'divisible', movement is 'indivisible', and occurs only in duration. Movement cannot be reconstituted without the addition of an abstract idea of time. This proposition has obvious implications for cinema: film cannot reconstitute movement by presenting a succession of instants. Movement is not a succession of instants but takes place within an indivisible period of time. The presentation of a series of instants can only become a series of instants of movement, where the viewer invariably misses the movement as such. Indeed for Bergson a mechanism such as cinema constructed from immobile sections can only produce a 'cinematographic illusion'. [14] For Deleuze in contrast, cinema is not composed of immobile images (to which movement is added) but animates an 'intermediate image' that already contains movement - that is already 'mobile' (C1 2). Cinema does not add movement to images, insists Deleuze, but 'immediately gives us a movement-image'. [15]
[9] Deleuze's consideration of Bergson's second thesis critically explores his distinction between two different forms of creating the illusion of movement – the ancient and the modern. In antiquity movement was created from complete individual immobile forms. In this manner movement is produced by the transition from one form to the next, from one privileged instant to another. This conception of movement suggests that it can only be recomposed as a series of 'poses'. Cinema would seem to be the culmination of Bergson's thesis of modern science, notes Deleuze, yet Bergson aligns it to antiquity and to the movement of privileged instants. Although Bergson's second thesis posits cinema as an ancient form of creating the illusion of movement, Deleuze proposes that it nevertheless points the way for cinema to belong to a modern conception of movement. Modern science reveals that movement can consist of 'any-instant-whatevers' rather than privileged instants. A 'mechanical succession of instants' ('immanent material elements/sections') replaces the 'dialectical order' of 'formal transcendental poses' (C1 4-5). Drawing on historical technological developments to make his case, Deleuze proposes cinema as a direct descendent of the snapshot combined with the development of the cinematic camera and projector. For Deleuze the development of equidistant snapshots combined with a mechanism to advance film enables cinema to 'create an impression of continuity' (C1 5). Deleuze concludes that Bergson's second thesis on movement enables a new way of thinking about cinema, not as the ancient form of creating the illusion of movement, but as a system that shapes and perfects the modern conception of reality.
[10] Bergson's third thesis is that movement as a translation into space affects the whole: movement expresses change and thus duration. This notion of duration is premised on relations between things. By waiting for movement we also experience duration (as in Bergson's example of waiting for sugar to dissolve). Any change that occurs affects the whole. When an object moves it has an effect on the respective positions and relations of other objects in that whole. Relation defines the whole; movement does not simply change the position of objects in space it transforms the whole. This whole is not a given but is 'the Open' in a constant state of flux. Bergson's original thesis that movement through the use of immobile sections is an illusion is now reconsidered. For Deleuze there are two aspects of movement: that which happens between objects and that which expresses duration. Conceived within duration, that which produces movement through the use of mobile sections (to suggest qualitative change) is not an illusion. The third thesis is in some sense the culmination of the first two - movement expresses change and duration of the whole: 'not only is the instant an immobile section of movement, but movement is a mobile section of duration, that is, of the Whole' (C1 8). The result of the third thesis for Deleuze is that we encounter three levels: a closed system of distinct parts (immobile sections); a movement that affects the positions of objects (where the introduction of movement affects their respective positions and their relation to the whole); and the duration or whole that is in constant change. Translated into cinematic terms, there are: 'immobile sections of movement', mobile-sections, i.e. 'movement-images', and, finally, 'time-images' (C1 12).
[11] Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson's theses on movement underpins two types of images in Deleuze's Cinema books: the movement-image (that expresses movement but expresses time only indirectly) and the time-image (that expresses duration - the pure image of time). [16] Although Deleuze does not set out to provide a chronological survey, he suggests that there is a general sense in which prior to World War Two the 'movement-image' dominates cinema while post-war, the 'time-image' can be seen to proliferate. Deleuze wishes to provide a taxonomy or classification of cinema in relation to thought. Cinema 1 and 2 can be seen as plotted along chronological lines but the impetus for this succession is purely conceptual. Although the time-image is exemplified in post-war cinema, it can also be found in pre-war cinema where we may observe the breaking through of the time-image where it is restricted or enveloped by the movement-image. Bergson's theses on movement contextualise the split between the movement-image and the time-image as it occurs in Deleuze's cinema books.
[12] Time is a recurrent theme in Deleuze's project from his early work on Proust and Bergson, through Logic of Sense (the analysis of Stoic time) and Difference and Repetition (time as synthesis) to his later analysis of cinema. [17] Deleuze's account of time does not conform to the conventional view of time as progression or as a succession of instants. This is also clear in Deleuze's later book with Guattari, What is Philosophy?, when Deleuze and Guattari discuss stratigraphic time (the time of philosophy) where before and after are superimposed and co-existent. [18] In his Preface to Cinema 2, Deleuze notes that 'over several centuries, from the Greeks to Kant, a revolution took place in philosophy: the subordination of time to movement was reversed, time ceases to be the measurement of normal movement' (C2 xi). Kant, according to Christian Kerslake:
inaugurates modern thinking about time. Kant makes time the transcendental condition of all of our experience, so that it is the structure of time itself, as stretched out, projected and synthesized by a human subject, that in the first place conditions our experience of moving bodies, and not vice versa. So time conditions movement. [19]
The shift from 'movement-image' to 'time-image' that occurs in Deleuze's account of cinema can be seen as a recapitulation of the revolution that took place in the philosophy of time. The revolution in cinema is also centred on the transition from a subordination of time (to movement, as in the movement-image), to a cinema of the time-image where the 'pure image of time' emerges. The dominant subordination of time to movement in pre-war cinema negated the pure image of time inherent in cinema. Deleuze's 'time-image' (predominantly constructed from the examples of post-war cinema) not only embodies the revolution of the philosophy of time but restores the true content of cinema. What cinema does, according to Deleuze, is capture time in its image.
Time Exposure and Time-Image in Schneider's Durational Portraits
[13] Deleuze's proposal that the time-image restores the true content of cinema derives in part from his belief that time is contained in the durational apparatus of cinema. At first glance it would seem that the photograph cannot approach the qualities of the time-image. A singular static image, the photograph does not preserve the duration of its recording in the way that film does. Photography is not a time-based medium in the sense of its presentation, but it is time-based in the manner of its durational recording of reality. As John Szarkowski has indicated, photographs are 'time exposures' and 'each describes a discrete parcel of time'. Each photograph traces the entire duration of its exposure. Moreover, the photograph may also convey something of its duration. The long exposure highlights the stretching of the photographic exposure and presents a durational image. By recording a succession of moments in one frame, the long exposure enacts a simultaneity of time. It is in this form of photography that is counter to the snapshot that we may glimpse a pure fragment of time.
[14] Having introduced the context of Deleuze's discussion of the time-image, I will now consider this concept in relation to Gary Schneider's Durational Portraits. Schneider's photographs embody change and endurance. In what follows, I will consider stillness in the moving image and movement in the still image. I will argue that Schneider's Durational Portraits do not constitute a privileged moment but move beyond the singular image and become multiple. Far from producing an 'eternal pose', Durational Portraits comprise a series of successive 'any-instant-whatevers' that coalesce onto a single frame. The notion of the pose is undone in Durational Portraits in much the way that Barthes claims it is undone by cinema - 'the pose is swept away and denied by the continuous series of images' (CL 78).
[15] Gary Schneider's Durational Portraits arose from with the artist's experiments with long exposures in 1989. [20] Inspired by the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, the series began as black and white portraits of faces. [21] The project developed into colour and culminated in his large scale Nudes. Schneider's use of long exposures is motivated by an attempt to break away from the contrived control that the sitter has over the pose. The resulting images also highlight the capacity of the photograph to function as a time-exposure rather than as an instantaneous image. Durational Portraits do not convey a 'pose' but the impression of a filmic 'passing' before the camera.
[16] Like cinema, the long exposure represents movement via a series of successive images. The distinction lies with the mechanism of the apparatus and in the nature of the continuity. Cinema produces an appearance of continuity at the speed of 24 frames a second. The long exposure photograph, however, captures the entire duration that unfolds before it. The continuity occurs because the still camera is set to record continuously (since in the case of the long exposure the shutter is left open). In this sense it functions much like the movie camera but it is almost as if the movement of the film through the camera has been disrupted. The cessation of a mechanism to progress the reel of film forward would create a series of shots superimposed onto a single frame. The long exposure presents something akin to a series of still slides projected on top of each other (rather than a roll of film that is in constant movement through an apparatus). While the moving image consists of a reel of stills, the long exposure produces these moments on a single frame. It is as if the frames are accumulating to provide a depth of time on a single image rather than a movement through space and an extension onto a series of successive frames. The long exposure can present a continuity of any-instant-whatevers rather than a selected privileged moment. While not presenting an actual movement in time, the photograph can represent the movement that occurred in its duration. The long exposure traces a continuity of movement (albeit without animation).The long exposure not only extends the time of the photograph, it reveals that time in its image.
[17] Schneider's Durational Portraits occur through their extended duration and the performativity of the sitter and photographer. Conventionally performativity in a portrait would be assigned purely to the sitter. However, in Schneider's Durational Portraits there is also a performative process on the part of the actions of the photographer. Schneider's subjects are positioned in a dark room and asked to lie still on the floor. The large camera is positioned above them and the shutter is left open. The subject is 'exposed' by the light of a small hand held torch (or flashlight, which provides the only light source) which Schneider traces around the sitter. The body is rendered visible, sequentially, and the negative is accordingly exposed. The long exposure times demand a period of stillness but the duration of that extended exposure makes the task of staying completely still difficult - as the blurring in many of the images reveals. It is not the momentary release of a shutter that determines the resulting image, or the opening of the aperture; these photographs are determined by the extended duration of the encounter between the moving photographer and his subject. The subjectivity that surfaces may be that of the sitter but the image is exposed via the photographer's movement.
[18] The photographer's gaze asserts control over the image: there is a direct manifestation of what the photographer has seen as he has circled the sitter. In photography the gaze of the artist is fundamental to the work - the photographer frames, exposes and screens the subject. The gaze of the photographer is apparent in the photograph: the point of focus, the illumination, the composition, the length of exposure, the depth of field. Nowhere is this more evident than in Schneider's Durational Portraits. Schneider's gaze literally renders the image visible; his probing of the body is manifested in the image through the process of his illumination. The exposures reveal where he lingered. The areas rendered with greatest clarity reveal where his gaze concentrated. In some images the movement of the photographer appears as a visible tracing, as in Shirley (2001) where there are dozens of swirls of light reflected in the glasses of the sitter. The photograph comes into being through light; light is the active agent that illuminates and exposes the image. Schneider's Durational Portraits visualise this becoming through light. In Durational Portraits Schneider's gaze is encompassed and preserved via his illumination of his subject.
[19] There is a becoming of the photograph through the collaborative performative process in conjunction with the illumination. [22] The photograph comes into being via the movement of the photographer's flashlight in combination with the waiting of the sitter. Bazin explained the operation of the photograph as the 'taking of an impression, by the manipulation of light'. [23] The photograph is, in Barthes words, 'an emanation of the referent' and light is 'here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed' (CL 80-81). The sitter enters into composition with the photograph through the indexical operation of light. What is produced is also a reflexive tracing of the photograph's own becoming and of its duration. Schneider's Durational Portraits counter the categorisation of photography as purely representational; rather, they embody a creative becoming. Schneider has stated that the process acquires the quality of a shamanic performance: the artist dancing around his subject, counting the time as a chant, moving the light through the darkness. [24] The resulting image demonstrates movement rather than stillness, and a durational performance rather than posing.
[20] Curtis L. Carter comments that Schneider brings 'qualities of live performance' to the still photograph where 'the development of a character or an action involves the duration of time'. [25] This long exposure entails an experience of duration on the part of the sitter too. Although placed comfortably beneath the camera, they are sometimes required to lie still in the dark for up to a couple of hours. The period of waiting imposed on the sitter recalls Bergson's account of waiting for sugar to dissolve in water:
I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not that mathematical time which would apply equally well to the entire history of the material world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived.[26]
It is useful to consider Bergson's concept of duration in order to think through what is entailed in the extended temporality of a durational portrait. Duration as Bergson indicates is not simply consciousness, but entails lived experience. While space is divisible, time is indivisible. 'We do not think real time', says Bergson, 'we live it' (CE 46). Bergson's thesis on time does not propose a straightforward continuity but an assemblage of simultaneous times. We carry our past with us, and through memory we continuously bring the past into the future. Memory enacts 'the prolongation of the past into the present'; it is 'duration, acting and irreversible' (CE 17). Time is not to be understood as discrete instants but as successive states that pass into each other amid continuous change. If our duration was one instant replacing another, writes Bergson, then 'there would never be anything but the present' (CE 4). Peter Hallward highlights that 'the key to Bergson's philosophy is his insistence on the indivisible continuity of time'.[27] The operation of the long exposure photograph mirrors the Bergsonian account of time. The long exposure captures an extended duration of successive states and presents these as indivisible.
Gary Schneider, Helen (2000). « http://garyschneider.visualserver.com/portfolio.cfm?nK=8950&nS=0&i=88406 »
[21] Initially, a Durational Portrait appears as a straightforward representation, but one quickly senses that something is awry. Helen (2000) clearly demonstrates the distortion that occurs as a result of the long exposure process. Her right eye is significantly higher than her left, and her nose and mouth are blurred. We are confronted by the intense stare of the focused left eye and the blurred passivity of the right eye. But it is the asymmetry that causes most unease – a lack of symmetry provokes anxiety at an unconscious level. Asymmetry in the human face is one of the signs of death – it indicates the departure of consciousness and the mind's abandonment of control over the features. In death, asymmetry takes over.[28] Schneider has a particular order in which he photographs each part of the face: he starts with the hair and forehead, then moves on to the sitter?s left eye, left nose, left cheek, lips and chin, right cheek, right nose, right eye. [29] Schneider has revealed that Helen coughed while he exposed her lips and it was this movement that caused the blurring and asymmetry in the registration of the image. Looking closer, we can almost determine the movement of Schneider from left to right in a clockwise direction around the face and we begin to understand the distortion that occurred as a result of Helen's movement. The duration of this image reveals the photographic process; Helen comprises a shift from single movement-image to montage in the camera. [30]
[22] The critic Michael Weinstein has stressed that we could never 'see' Helen as she appears in Schneider's portraits, since 'her expression is a composite of the different nuances of emotion that she displayed as she sat for a 30 minute exposure'. [31] For Schneider, the portraits are psychological revelations - 'it's the secretion of all the expressions they were making during the exposure - what they were thinking, what they were feeling, or what they were projecting'. [32] A durational photograph epitomises the notion of the portrait as revelatory; it is quite literally a prolonged exposure of the subject. Indeed, early photographic portraits involving long exposures are often read as possessing an 'aura' and conveying a greater intensity of 'presence'.
[23] Walter Benjamin's assessment of the aura seems particularly relevant here. In 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' Benjamin famously mourns the loss of aura from the art work. The traditional interpretation of this essay focuses on the fact that the aura withers in the age of mechanical reproduction. However, Benjamin also concedes here that early photographic portraits do possess an aura: 'for the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face'. [33] In 'A Short History of Photography', Benjamin is even more assertive, insisting that the subjects of early portraits had 'an aura about them, a medium which mingled with their manner of looking'. [34] Benjamin suggests that this was perhaps compounded by the prolonged duration of their being looked at by the camera – the long exposure times enabled a particular synthesis of expression whereby the character of the sitter grew into the picture. The technical features of early photography could also be a contributory factor. [35] The mere utilisation of an early photographic technique does not guarantee this auratic quality.
[24] There are a number of factors that could contribute to the attribution of aura in these early photographs. Perhaps another reason why these photographs seem to possess an aura is because the subjects are temporally so remote. Those photographed in the 1840s were alive a century before Benjamin's essay was written. [36] Just as aura is conceived of as the unique phenomenon of a distance in the spatial sense, it may also be understood with regard to temporal distance. We could conclude that the photograph that possesses an aura is one whose referent is temporally remote. Benjamin concludes that it is the coming together of both object and technique (the combination of the expression of the sitter with the particular technical processes of early photography) that produces the aura. However, David Rodowick has emphasised that Benjamin's interest in early photography was motivated by his fascination with the 'interval of time marked by exposure': 'In the technological transition from an exposure time requiring several hours to only fractions of a second, Benjamin marked the gradual evaporation of aura from the image'. [37] For Rodowick, Benjamin's account of aura is 'clearly related to Bergson's durée':
For Benjamin, the longer the interval of exposure, the greater the chance that the aura of an environment – the complex temporal relations woven through its represented figures – would seep into the image, etching itself on the photographic plate. [38]
Rodowick reads Benjamin's account of the long exposure photograph as a 'primitive time-image, a kind of open window on accumulating duration'; conversely, the reduction of the exposure time in 'instantaneous' photography enabled 'the representation of movement'. [39] Rodowick's reading would seem to support the idea that the long exposure photograph pertains to a time-image.
Stillness in the Moving Image
[25] It is interesting to compare the visualisation of movement within photography – as it occurs in Gary Schneider's Helen – to Deleuze's discussion on stillness within the moving image. Deleuze views stillness within a film as a confrontation with photography. This confrontation, however, is not seen as the moment when film becomes photography but when it becomes most distinct from it. The moment where the film becomes most cinematic is the very point when it appears to break down, where it pauses. Perhaps coincidentally, this may also mark the point where the viewer suddenly becomes conscious of the film's existence as film, i.e. as animated and moving. A sequence of a still life within a film is the opposite of the purely optical or sound image. [40] For Deleuze, the still life is a time image: 'The still life is time, for everything that changes is time, but time itself does not change' (C2 16).
[26] The films of the Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu are singled out by Deleuze as exemplary in their presentation of stasis and still-life. In Ozu's still-lifes we perceive change alongside stasis. The coexistence of change and endurance conveys duration: 'Ozu's still-lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this representation of the vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states' (C2 16). This analysis posits the still-life as a symbol of endurance – of the preservation of the past amidst the ever changing present. In Ozu's Late Spring and Autumn Afternoon, stillness can symbolise an emotional transition point or the moment when a character has become resigned to their fate. In both films empty interior scenes of the family home occur at the point where the daughters have left for a new life of marriage. Ozu's meditation on an empty home devoid of inhabitants evokes the loneliness of those left behind. The still-life can be at once a symbol of turmoil and an embodiment of enduring loss. The vase scene in Late Spring occurs at the point where the daughter contemplates her future life away from her father. The vase embodies her isolation and stands in for her repressed emotions. Although it appears as static, the still-life symbolises change, it evokes duration rather than pure stasis. For Deleuze, the vase scene embodies 'becoming, change, passage' while demonstrating that 'the form of what changes does not itself change, does not pass on' (C2 16). In this sense it presents a direct time-image. [41]
[27] Ozu's still-life scenes embody the Bergsonian concept of duration; the stillness and lack of action paradoxically symbolises transition. For Bergson duration is 'the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future' (CE 4). Duration then can be understood simplistically as the persistence of the past. In An Introduction to Metaphysics Bergson proclaims that it is memory that 'prolongs the past into the present'. [42] Without memory 'there would be no duration, but only instantaneity'. [43] Memory conveys the past into the future; it is 'the very basis of our conscious existence' and this prolongation of the past is 'in a word, duration, acting and irreversible' (CE 17). Duration unfolds through the persistence of memory in the perceiver. Ozu's still-life serves as a pause for reflection amid the unstoppable duration of change in the lives of the characters. The prolonged focus on a still-life often occurs during an emotional change that remains unseen. In Floating Weeds the still landscape persists, contrasting with the flags moving in the wind. The viewer's experience of duration is similar to that of Bergson's experience of waiting for sugar to dissolve – it is as if the viewer is put into the position of waiting for the film to move again. This experience of waiting reveals the pure fragment of time.
[28] In long exposure photography the sitter's experience of waiting is central to the production of the image. The duration of that waiting is condensed into a single frame. Deleuze's account of stillness within Ozu's films (as representing the moment when film confronts photography) may be compared to the movement within the still image that we find in Schneider's Durational Portraits. [44] Durational Portraits are a confrontation with the duration of film and with its continuity. Photography may be restricted in terms of stillness; the photograph can only present an image of what-has-been, but photographs – particularly long exposure photographs – can present a simultaneity of time in one image: a time-image. Although the photograph does not preserve the duration of its creation in its viewing experience, it nevertheless comes into being as a result of its exposure time; it occurs in and through time. By visualising the movement that occurred during the long exposure (through blurring), Durational Portraits suggest the duration of that exposure. Durational Portraits illustrate how movement within duration is brought forth as the subject of the work. Devoid of the constraints of the cinematic sensory-motor system, the durational portrait subordinates movement to time and reveals a direct time-image.
The Time Image
[29] The time-image transcends the notion of chronological time and produces instead a co-existence of past, present and future. Similarly, Durational Portraits present a coexistence of a present with its past and future. Gary Schneider's Helen presents an image that prolongs the photographic exposure and appears to approximate to a durational time-image. The extension of the photographic instant is exchanged for the contraction of space. Alongside the contraction of the image (onto one frame) there is a condensing of time. Unlike cinema, where the reception of the film entails the endurance of the duration of the recording, still photography presents a single photographic image.[45] The long exposure, however, stretches the length of the recording from that of an instant plucked out of a continuum of time to something that pertains to duration. The image is constructed from phantom layers that make up the distinct moments of the photograph. Indeed, the idea of phantom layers is particularly apt since Deleuze asserts that 'the direct time-image is the phantom which has always haunted the cinema'.[46] Each moment is encapsulated into a single frame as if the layers of time are compacted and condensed. The layers of instants in the durational images operate like Deleuze's simultaneous 'peaks of presents and sheets of time' in Cinema 2: between the past and the present there exist strata of sheets of time, each with its own 'tones' and 'aspects' (C2 96).
[30] Time accumulates and manifests itself in layers that accumulate to provide not actual depth but a virtual depth of immaterial time. The layers of moments that occur in the durational portrait accumulate to provide a temporal depth rather than a spatial one. Schneider's portraits present not only a contraction of actual space (the duration taking place in a single frame), but also a restricted depth of field. The portraits consist of close-ups that disregard any notion of background or foreground. The shallow depth of field is exchanged for a depth of time in the image. We are reminded of Deleuze's thesis on the time-image where time becomes perceptible when the depth of field is crushed or flattened. Deleuze finds the time-image in Dreyer's 'crushing of depth and the planitude of the image' (C2 37). 'There are time-images which are formed through suppression of depth (depth in the field as well as depth of field) and this case of the planitude of the image itself has a number of forms' (C2 105). 'Planitude' can be understood here as multiple levels of flat surfaces – a plenitude of planes.
[31] Schneider's Nudes series utilises similar techniques as his Durational Portraits and convey both the time of their exposure and the flatness that is characteristic of the time-image. Exposing the entire body necessitates a longer exposure time (the duration can last for a couple of hours). Presented in portrait format inside a black rectangle, the photographed subjects loom out of the darkness. They appear to be standing up or hoisted vertically into a state of discomfort, the head seems too large and heavy for the body to support it and this adds to the sense of constriction. A closer look at the position of the head and neck reveals that they are lying down, with the head prominently advancing from the rest of the body. The parts of the body closest to the camera appear disproportionate to the rest of the figure. We can follow Schneider's orderly tracing of his flashlight in a circular clockwise direction, the exposure starting on the forehead and face (as with the heads series) before continuing down the body. The light concentrates on the face, the hands and the genitals. Schneider often pauses at the head, the length of the exposure results in it being rendered fluorescent, almost preternatural. This is particularly true of Tom (2002) whose head acquires a spectral iridescent quality.
Gary Schneider, Tom (2002). « http://garyschneider.visualserver.com/portfolio.cfm?nK=7859&nS=0&nL=1 »
[32] Tom appears almost trancelike; his blue eyes stare fixedly into space. We are reminded of Benjamin's account of Klee's Angelus Novus – staring at catastrophe, looking back into the future. He seems almost in repose, but simultaneously alert, standing to attention. There is a fixed grin on his face but the expression seems to fluctuate - simultaneously animated and inanimate. Subjected to the gaze, his discomfort in being photographed is palpable. Some of the subjects appear flattened as if confined to the space which encloses them. Lying in this vertical rectangle, with their hands placed on their thighs, they recall a Pietà, and particularly Holbein's elongated The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb of 1521. These subjects also appear as if in coffins, constrained and confined in the dark rectangle of the photograph. Their flesh is often rendered pallid, sometimes dappled or discoloured and bruised, their bodies glowing against the blackness that seeks to envelop them. These images recall Barthes's assessment of the photograph – 'each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death' (CL 97). Photography is for Barthes 'a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless' (CL 32) and death is the eidos of photography. Tom (2002) renders visible what occurs in posing for the photograph – during the photographic take we are trapped and effectively stilled in the search-light of the flash: we enter a 'flat death' (CL 92). There is often a sense of interrogation - an extreme exposure, a revelation of vulnerability. Confined and restrained, these bodies struggle under the weight of their heads. Some grin maniacally, others look frightened under the gaze of the camera.
[33] As composite images, and the result of long exposures, Schneider's Nudes series reveal minute movements that are usually imperceptible. Occasionally we can discern the trace of a previous position through the doubling of the head or a fingertip. We are reminded of the work of Eadweard Muybridge where the serial capturing of movement reveals the actuality of movement. However, with Schneider's photographs, the serialisation occurs on a single negative in the camera. The tracing of movement through an extended exposure time is quite distinct from that produced by a series of instantaneous photographs.
[34] In exceeding the instant assigned to the photograph, the long exposure incorporates duration and presents a time-image where the distinction between the past, present and future are indiscernible:
What we call temporal structure, or direct time-image, clearly goes beyond the purely empirical succession of time – past-present-future. It is, for example, a coexistence of distinct durations, or of levels of duration; a single event can belong to several levels: the sheets of past coexist in a non-chronological order (C2 xii).
In 'The Brain is the Screen' Deleuze returns to Ozu's still-life to explicate his concept of simultaneous times: 'Ozu's still-life is the form of time that doesn't change, even though everything changes within it'.[47] The silence and stillness expresses one rhythm of time as an unchanging continuity while off-camera the lives of the characters are subject to another rhythm that is more akin to a vortex of flux.
[35] The long exposure's ability to render time visible recalls Deleuze's analysis of the creative image. For Deleuze the artwork contains a coexistence of durations where the past, present and future occur simultaneously. What occurs in the image is not a singular duration of time but the multiplicity of time relations. The visibility of time attributed to the creative image is not to be understood in the purely representational sense; this is not an illustration of time through the filmic techniques of flashback or recollection. Deleuze's analysis of the creative image refers to art in general, but has particular resonance with regard to long exposure photography: the durational image always has a before and after contained within it. [48] Schneider's Durational Portraits demonstrate Deleuze's thesis that a work of art can make time visible:
The image itself is an ensemble of time relations from the present which merely flows, either as a common multiple, or as the smallest divisor. Relations of time are never seen in ordinary perception, but they are seen in the image, as long as it is a creative one. The image renders time relations – relations that can't be reduced to the present – sensible and visible (BS 371).
The subjects in Gary Schneider's durational portraits seem to occupy time rather than space. Movement is subordinated to time. The change in the image is represented by a change in time rather than in the space of the image. [49] The image is temporal, plunging the viewer into an abyss of time rather than spatial depth (C2 37). In Schneider's durational portraits we encounter a simultaneity of times. One sheet of time unfolds onto another sheet - to another moment in the duration of the exposure. Helen illustrates the time content of the photographic exposure, revealing both the before and the after of her involuntary cough that causes a blur and duplication in the position of her eye in the image. Helen exemplifies the durational content of the long exposure and exceeds the idea of the photograph as an instantaneous image. The blurring of the image corresponds to the indiscernibility that occurs in the time-image.
[36] The time-image reaches its apotheosis in Deleuze's crystal-image. The multi-faceted qualities of the crystal encapsulate the indiscernibility of the time-image. Time splits into two 'dissymmetrical jets' – one preserving the past while the other makes the present pass on (C2 79). Time is not presented here as chronological but as comprising coexisting and overlapping temporalities. The linearity of time is disrupted and replaced by the co-existence of past and future with the present. Deleuze's time-image embodies Bergson's thesis on the persistence of memory. 'What we see through the pane or in the crystal is time, in its double movement of making presents pass...but also of preserving all the past, dropping it into an obscure depth' (C2 84). The crystal circuit contains time in its pure state that is constantly attempting to constitute itself between the two indiscernible images (C2 79). Schneider's Durational Portraits embody a crystallisation of time in a single image. Durational Portraits enact Deleuze's account of the time-image, they make time visible – they reveal the time from which they are composed and reflect on the nature of time.
[37] Schneider's Durational Portraits comprise a form of temporal montage consisting of a superimposition of discrete moments onto a single image. The series of chronological successions merge and become indiscernible. In this sense they operate as a pure image of time encompassing the Bergsonian concept of duration. [50] Durational Portraits present a simultaneity of time in a single image – a coalescence of past and present that is counter to the snapshot and closer to film. In this coexistence of different instants, time rises to the surface of the photographic print and becomes visible. The photograph is in a constant state of appearing, of depicting and revealing, but it rarely depicts itself in its own process of becoming. Schneider's Durational Portraits however, depict the process of the medium as a coming into being through light. In their extended exposure they also problematise the supposed instantaneous nature of photography and reveal time as the content of the image.
Conclusion
[38] In this paper I have proposed that photography can transcend the instantaneous snapshot and produce a durational time exposure. I have examined the temporality of photography through the work of theorists such as Barthes and Benjamin and reflected on the experience of being photographed as well as on the resulting image. I have suggested that the long exposure photograph exemplified photography's capacity to produce a durational image. Given the lack of attention devoted to theorisations of duration in photography, I examined duration via Deleuze's account of cinema. I have also considered Deleuze's reading of Bergson's theses on movement in order to explore movement and duration with reference to Deleuze's 'time-image'. In the second part of the paper, I have examined Gary Schneider's Durational Portraits and Nudes series as examples of long exposure photography that reveal the extended time of their exposure and present a time-image.
[39] Although Deleuze's time-image and account of duration are attributed to cinema, I have proposed that this analysis is pertinent to a discussion of the durational capacity of the photograph. It is in photography – particularly the long exposure – that we find the clearest expression of an image of time. The potential of the medium to be a time image was already there in the 'early portraits' when long exposures were necessary and the sitter 'grew into the picture'. [51] The long exposure operates in a similar way to cinema's recording of a duration of time; as a static single image it cannot re-present the integrity of its duration but it nevertheless represents the result of movement as it unfolded before the camera. For Deleuze, cinema comprises individual photograms that are 'intermediate images' that already contain movement (C2 2). The long exposure is also an 'intermediate image' between photography and cinema; rather than being already mobile it is already durational, it contains time compressed into a single frame. An account of the creative image's ability to render time visible (regardless of whether that work was durational in its presentation) further emphasises the applicability of Deleuze's account of duration and time to photography.
[40] In Schneider's Durational Portraits the movement of the sitter unfolds in the extended duration of her/his photographic exposure. There is no reconstitution of movement but movement is preserved as indivisible within the single static image. Deleuze's reading of Bergson's theses on movement suggests that although movement is 'indivisible', cinema is capable of creating a continuity of movement via any-instant-whatevers. Moreover, cinema – consisting of mobile sections – can suggest qualitative change within duration. The long exposure records and represents a continuity of movement and duration (albeit in a static representation). This continuous capturing of the movement demonstrates the photograph's ability to function as a 'window' of 'accumulating duration'. [52] The blurring that occurs in Schneider's long exposures is the result of the movement of the sitter but this movement is captured as a whole. Rather than presenting the movement cinematically through individual photograms, or photographically as a series of poses, durational portraits convey a sensation of movement and the passage of time.
[41] The movement-image has dominated photography as it has cinema. Muybridge's serial snapshots of horses may reveal actual movement but they lend themselves too easily to illusionistic animation and fail to convey the sensation of movement in time that we find in the time exposure or time-image. For Deleuze, the cinema's prehistory is grounded not in the early days of photography (where the technology necessitated long-exposures) but in the later era of the snapshot as exemplified by the work of Marey and Muybridge. [53] Mary Ann Doane, in 'Real Time: Instantaneity and the Photographic Imaginary', has argued that such 'instantaneous photography both reveals and hence corroborates the stillness of the photographic image and acts as the condition of possibility of the filmic illusion of movement'. [54] With the long exposure (or time exposure), however, we find a photograph whose condition of possibility is the time-image. The collapse of the movement-image enables time in its 'pure state' to rise up to 'the surface of the' photograph (C2 xii).
[42] I attempted to argue that the extended exposure of Schneider's Durational Portraits aligns the photographs with the time-image. Durational Portraits challenge both the notion of the photograph as a snapshot of time (removed from a continuum), and the characterisation of the medium as comprising 'formal transcendental poses' (C1 4-5). Durational Portraits not only trace a continuity of movement they describe a figure that is always 'in the process of being formed' (C1 5); the long exposure continually traces its subject, providing an imprint of the entirety of its extended duration. The resulting movement is not recorded as individual poses or privileged instants but as the continuous succession of 'any-instant-whatevers'. Moreover, the continuity of the long exposure – the manner in which the shutter is left open continuously – is similar to the continuity that is central to cinema.
[43] This investigation began from the perspective of John Szarkowski – that 'there is in fact no such thing as an instantaneous photograph. All photographs are time exposures'. I have argued that the long exposure exemplifies Szarkowski's account of the time exposure. The time exposure protracts time rather than freezing an instant. Schneider's Durational Portraits exemplify the time exposure as they convey the sensation of movement in time rather than presenting a seriality of individual poses. Only in the time exposure may photography provide a continuity of movement. The blurring caused by Helen's movement in time demonstrates the duration of the portrait and echoes de Duve's assertion that 'the aesthetic ideal of time exposure is thus a slight out-of-focus'. [55] It was via Deleuze's account of duration and the time-image that the condition of possibility of the time exposure was rendered visible. By considering the long exposure via Deleuze's writing on cinema we can begin to see the possibility of moving photography beyond Bazin's dismissive claim that 'its instantaneity compels it to capture time only piecemeal'. Conversely, the long exposure photograph [as well as cinema] 'makes a molding of the object as it exists in time and, furthermore, makes an imprint of the duration of the object'. In Schneider's Durational Portraits we encounter a time exposure that is also a time-image.
The author wishes to thank Gary Schneider for supplying images of Helen and Tom.
Notes
[1] André Bazin, 'Theater and Cinema (Part Two)', in What is Cinema? (Berkely: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 95-124 (pp. 96-97).
[2] John Szarkowski, 'Introduction', The Photographer's Eye (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980). Reprinted in The Photography Reader, ed. by Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 97-103 (p. 101).
[3] Peter Wollen, 'Fire and Ice', in The Photography Reader, ed. by Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 76-80 (p. 76).
[4] André Bazin, 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image', in What is Cinema? op.cit., p. 14.
[5] Peter Wollen, 'Fire and Ice', in The Photography Reader, op cit. p.77.
[6] On the subject of the 'time exposure' see also Thierry de Duve, 'Time Exposure and the Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox', October, 5 (Summer 1978), 113-125.
[7] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, tr. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 96. (Originally published in French as La Chambre Claire by Editions du Seuil 1980). Hereafter CL.
[8] In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes distinguishes between two distinct levels of potential meaning in the photographic image by adopting the terms studium and punctum. The studium describes the intended or obvious meaning, whereas the punctum is described as a hidden and personal meaning which 'wounds' and 'pricks' the onlooker (pp. 26-27). In contrast to the studium, the punctum operates on the unconscious rather than at conscious level and is sometimes triggered by memory. Although the punctum is originally posited in the form of a detail, the discussion of the Gardner photograph introduces a 'new punctum' to that of the detail: this 'new punctum...is Time, the lacerating emphasis of...that-has-been' (CL 96).
[9] For a discussion of the pose and/or stillness in photography, see Laura Mulvey's 'The Possessive Spectator', in Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image, ed. by David Green and Joanna Lowry (Brighton: Photoworks, 2006), pp. 151-163. An earlier analysis of this subject is offered by Craig Owens in his Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. by Scott Bryson [et al]. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); see his 'The Rhetoric of the Pose' (1984) 'The Medusa Effect; or, The Spectacular Ruse' and his essay 'Posing' (1985) reprinted in this same volume.
[10] David Campany, 'Posing, Acting, Photography' in Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image, op.cit., pp. 97-112 (p. 107).
[11] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image tr. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 79. Hereafter C1. Deleuze's writing on film may not at first glance seem an obvious place from which to begin an ontology of the photograph. Deleuze had very little to say about photography and what he did say was rather dismissive. The most sustained comments on photography appear in Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Deleuze asserts that 'too many people mistake a photograph for a work of art' Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, tr. by Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 63. [originally published in French in 1981]. Typically Deleuze aligns the photograph to the cliché (yet it is worth bearing in mind the connection between photo and cliché in the original French):'We are besieged by photographs that are illustrations, by newspapers that are narrations, by cinema-images, by television-images. There are psychic clichés just as there are physical clichés – ready-made perceptions, memories, phantasms', p. 61. Deleuze believes that the painter's task is to transform the clichés already there on the blank canvas. However, Deleuze acknowledges that Bacon is fascinated by photographs and that 'they can lay claim to aesthetic pretensions, and compete with painting' (p. 64).
[12] Deleuze 'considers the cinematographic/audio-visual image as moving matter, changing through time (as Bergsonian duration and the coexistance of layers of time)'. Patricia Pisters, 'From Mouse to Mouse - Overcoming Information', Enculturation, 2:1 (Fall 1998), « http://enculturation.gmu.edu/2_1/pisters.html »
[13] For Bergson the instantaneous photograph 'Isolates any moment; it puts them all in the same rank, and thus the gallop of a horse spreads out for it into as many successive attitudes as it wishes, instead of massing itself into a single attitude, which is supposed to flash out in a privileged moment and to illuminate a whole period' Creative Evolution, tr. by Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), p. 332. Hereafter CE. Bergson posits the photograph as superior to the natural perception of the eye. While the eye perceives a schematic account of the movement (in his example of a moving horse producing perhaps a kind of summation of the galloping), the photograph produces a more complete and precise record of 'any moment' - not a 'privileged moment'.
[14] Bergson's proposal that the 'immobile sections' are instants that cannot be reconstituted in time infers that the appearance of movement that is produced in film is false. Deleuze in contrast states that cinema does not produce an illusion of movement so much as a correction of our perception of movement. Cinema preserves the original continuity rather than producing an appearance of it. For Deleuze, cinema works 'in time'; the movement of its images occurs in time and time is part of its process: cinema works not with immobile sections but with mobile images. In contrast to Bergson, Deleuze insists that there is movement already in the image: cinema is constituted not by still but by movement images. For Deleuze cinema is not a 'reconstitution of mobility' (as Bergson insists) but a recording of that mobility as it happens - as passing in front of the camera. For Bergson's account of the cinematographic method see Creative Evolution, op.cit., p. 305.
[15] C1 p.2. According to Deleuze the technological evolution of cinema, i.e. the development of the portable camera (as separate from the projection device) was a contributory factor to the medium's capacity to capture mobile rather than immobile images - see C1 p.3.
[16] These concepts are examined respectively in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image tr. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2005), and Cinema 2: The Time-Image tr. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005) - hereafter C2.
[17] See Keith Faulkner's Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time (New York; Oxford: Peter Lang, c2006) for a study of time in Deleuze's project. James Williams also provides a useful analysis in his Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
[18] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, tr. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London/New York: Verso, 1994). [First published in 1991, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?], pp. 58-9.
[19] See Christian Kerslake's 'Transcendental Cinema: Deleuze, Time and Modernity', in Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 2005), 'Whereas philosophy before Kant thinks of time in relation to movement, Kant subordinates movement to time', 7- 19 (p. 7).
[20] Gary Schneider is a South African born artist based in New York. Schneider's background in performance art continues to inform his photographic work. Schneider?s work is available on his website at «http://garyschneider.visualserver.com/index.cfm». I would like to thank Gary Schneider for his emails detailing the order of exposure in his portraits and for supplying the images in this article.
[21] Long exposure photography involves the camera's shutter being left open to expose over a long period of time. Schneider describes Cameron's process as 'a very slow process' that uses 'very large wet-plate negatives'. 'Gary Schneider in Conversation' by Deborah Martin Kao in Gary Schneider: Portraits, (New Haven and London: Harvard University Art Museums & Cambridge Yale University Press, 2004), p. 107. Schneider can be seen to be revisiting the techniques of early photography where long exposures times were necessary due to the low light sensitivity of the processes available. Schneider is not unique in his use of long exposures; a number of other artists are currently employing this method, such as the Korean artist Kyungwoo Chun, who also produces long exposure portraits.
[22] The concept of becoming is central to Deleuze's project; see particularly his Logic of Sense where the first chapter ('First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming') discusses Alice and Through the Looking Glass. Deleuze asserts that Alice's becoming 'larger than she was' is also her becoming 'smaller than she is now'. For Deleuze becoming pertains to the 'simultaneity' of time; becoming 'eludes the present' and the categories of 'before and after' are eroded, Logic of Sense tr. by Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004), pp.3-5.
[23] Andre Bazin, 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image', What is Cinema? op.cit., p.12.
[24] Gary Schneider in conversation with Roger Hargreaves, 'An audience with Gary Schneider', Facing Death (A Wellcome Trust Conference in association with the Royal College of Art and the National Portrait Gallery), London, 13 February 2005.
[25] Curtis L. Carter, 'Performance in Photography: Gary Schneider's Photographs' quoted by Deborah Martin Kao in Gary Schneider: Portraits, op.cit., p. 15.
[26] CE p.10. Bergson returns to this analogy later – 'Let me come back again to the sugar in my glass of water: why must I wait for it to melt? While the duration of the phenomenon is relative for the physicist, since it is reduced to a certain number of units of time and the units themselves are indifferent, this duration is an absolute for my consciousness, for it coincides with a certain degree of impatience which is rigorously determined. Whence comes this determination? What is it that obliges me to wait, and to wait for a certain length of psychical duration which is forced upon me, over which I have no power?' CE p. 339.
[27] Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006), p. 17.
[28] I am grateful to the artist Eleanor Crook for this point in her paper 'The Prosopography of the Dead' at the Facing Death Conference, op.cit.
[29] Email received by the author from the artist Gary Schneider on 14 March 2012. I would like to thank Gary Schneider for this helpful information and for providing an image of Helen illustrating his process of exposure.
[30] By montage here I mean the conventional definition within cinema comprising the juxtaposition of multiple images and/or successive shots. For Deleuze, montage is 'the determination of the whole...by means of continuities, cutting and false continuities' (C1 30). Montage is 'composition, the assemblage [agencement] of movement-images as constituting an indirect image of time (C1 31). Deleuze also discusses montage with reference to the time-image.
[31] Michael Weinstein 'Schneider Gallery', Chicago News and Arts Weekly, 21 December 1995. Weinstein is referring to another portrait of Helen by Schneider but the point is the same. As quoted by Deborah Martin Kao in Gary Schneider: Portraits, p. 13. Gary Schneider has informed the author that this photograph of Helen 'was an eight minute exposure after camera framing', email from the artist, op.cit.
[32] 'Gary Schneider in Conversation' by Deborah Martin Kao, op.cit., p. 113.
[33] Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Illuminations, tr. by Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 211-244 (p. 219) [subject to a number of revisions, first published in German in 1936]. Walter Benjamin's thesis on the aura is most often read through this celebrated essay; however, his 'A Short History of Photography' [originally published in 1931], in One-Way Street and other Writings (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 240-57 offers another dimension to the analysis of the aura with particular regard to early photography. Both essays discuss the decline of the aura in the age of mechanical reproduction – or technological reproducibility- but it is interesting to reflect on why Benjamin thought that early portraits could convey the aura of the sitter. Possible reasons include the lack of reproducibility of early photographic processes (that the portraits themselves were unique objects – as in the case of the daguerreotype- and not reproducible) and the innocence of the expression of the sitters unfamiliar with the new medium.
[34] There is a suggestion that the reason these early photographs possess an aura may be due to the expression of the sitters - their reluctance to look at the camera (and, indeed their unfamiliarity or naivety regarding photographs).Benjamin, 'Short History', ibid., p. 18.
[35] The daguerreotype is perhaps worth noting here because not only was it renowned for its resolution but, as Benjamin himself points out, it was a unique object which was often presented in a decorative case. Whereas photography proper is a process that involves the use of negatives that enable an infinite production of positive prints, the daguerreotype consists of a unique print.
[36] The image of Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall, the Newhaven fishwife photographed by Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill is dated as between 1843 and 1846. One wonders whether Benjamin's knowledge of the sitter's death (as they stare at us from the past) influenced his assertion that these portraits possessed an aura, i.e. whether the fact of their demise ensures that the portrait becomes an authentic representation in their absence. One could make a link here with Roland Barthes's later assertion that time acts as the punctum of the photograph (discussed above). The laceration of time is linked to the aura and to the punctum.
[37] David Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 8. Rodowick provides a useful account of Benjamin's analysis of early photography and the aura.
[38] Rodowick, ibid., pp. 8-9.
[39] Ibid., p. 9.
[40] 'If empty spaces, interiors or exteriors, constitute purely optical (and sound) situations, still lifes are the reverse, the correlate' (C2 16).
[41] In Deleuze's account of cinema there are direct and indirect images of time. The indirect image of time occurs in the changing space of the 'movement-image'. Conversely, the 'time-image' presents a direct or 'pure' image of time.
[42] Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. by T. E. Hulme (Indianapolis; Cambridge: Hackett, 1999), p. 40. [Originally published in French in 1903].
[43] Bergson, ibid., p. 40.
[44] Janet Harbord who has written on the employment of still images in Chris Marker's film La Jetée (Chris Marker: La Jetée, London & Cambridge, Massachusetts: Afterall Books & MIT, 2009) has proposed the existence of a moving still image in the work of David Claerbout - 'The Moving Still', talk at the Photographers' Gallery, London, Wednesday 14 September 2011. With the advent of digital technology the distinctions between still and moving images are further eroded. Claerbout's projections have been described as both a still image that occurs in time and a moving image that is still. His Kindergarten Antonio Sant'Elia, 1932 (1998) depicts children frozen in time while the leaves of a tree in the image move in the wind – this recalls the movement within stillness that we find in Ozu's films such as his Floating Weeds. Claerbout has said in an interview that 'In my work I think of the digital as a platform in which past, present, and future are not distinguishable from one another and instead coexist happily' ('Ori Gersht puts five questions to David Claerbout' originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Modern Painters, available on Artinfo May 14, 2009.
[45] By cinema here I am referring to analogue rather than digital cinema. As digitalisation complicates the ontological differences I am seeking to make between the still and the moving image, I am sidestepping that issue in order to emphasise the clear -and somewhat simplified- distinction as it exists in traditional media. However, as the previous footnote also illustrates, digitalisation problematises these distinctions. Furthermore, the notion of duration in film is undermined by the digitally constructed film.
[46] Deleuze here also construes the time-image as virtual 'in opposition to the actuality of the movement-image' C2 p. 40.
[47] 'The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze', tr. by Marie Therese Guirgis, in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. by Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 365-373 (p.371). [Interview originally published in Cahiers du Cinema in 1986]. Hereafter BS.
[48] See Deleuze's C2, pp. 36-7. See also Deleuze's interview in The Brain is the Screen op.cit. where the notion of a 'before' and 'after' are conceived in terms of simultaneity rather than in terms of chronological linear succession.
[49] Deleuze makes this clear in Cinema 2 when he states that Welles's Citizen Kane changes time rather than space (C2 37).
[50] Deleuze often refers to the time-image as conveying a pure image of time. This concept may originate in his reading of Proust. In ''Time in the Pure State': Deleuze, Proust and the Image of Time', Patrick Ffrench notes that in Time Regained Marcel uses the phrase – 'a fragment of time in the pure state' p. 162 in Time and the Image, ed. by Carolyn Bailey Gill (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
[51] Benjamin, 'A Short History of Photography' op.cit. p.245.
[52] David Rodowick, op.cit.
[53] 'not merely the photo, but the snapshot (the long-exposure photo [photo de pose] belongs to the other lineage)' (C1 5).
[54] Mary Ann Doane, 'Real Time: Instantaneity and the Photographic Imaginary' in Stillness and Time op.cit. p.26.
[55] Thierry de Duve 'Time Exposure and the Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox', op.cit., p. 121.