Time-Image Networks
As our methodology developed, we discovered that each new picture, when combined with an earlier image, forms a mutually dependent pair with fresh potency. Viewed in the same context, both photographs seem to extend beyond their own time frameworks and refer to an intervening period without actually describing a specific course of events. Thus, they enact the potential for an unusual dialectic about a changing landscape, a discourse that may be continued through time, activated by repeating the first images over and over. The earliest pictures mark the starting point, but no one image, first or latest in the series, represents a definitive statement. Each is simply another perspective in an ongoing time-image network. (Mark Klett)
The idea of participating with a site was reinforced by coming to see how each place might variously be represented by the photographer. Each series of photographs I took reminded me of a phenomenological exercise in perception—as if I were moving from vantage point to vantage point asking perceptual and conceptual questions about the place and receiving an appropriate response each time in the form of the resulting image.
My experience at each site became an interaction, a kind of double funnel: a flood of awareness poured in from the site and my selected responses seemed to pour back onto it. My experience was both an exchange and interchange, an engaging and a blending, an agreement and an affirmation. (Rick Dingus)
Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (1984)
The tendency to subsume representation within simulation is insidious. Simulation discounts or ignores the progression (rather than precession) of time and space, or the presence of matter itself:
Thus, perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images, murders of the real, murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity.
This would be the successive phases of the image:
—it is the reflection of a basic reality
—it masks and perverts a basic reality
—it masks the absence of a basic reality
—it bears no relationship to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (1983)
These two responses to images reflect to me not so much a difference between continental and American perspectives, but rather the schism between practitioner and theorist. The perspective of practitioners leads to far more interesting places,
Update: I was thrilled to see a gesture at the physicality of symbols on a commercial first thing this morning: The Cenex Guy.
February 25, 2007 1:03 AM
