Meditações - tempo e fotografia

Since its inception, the relationship between photography and time has forever been altered. Photography has been understood as the capture of an instant, the freezing of a single moment in time, a fragment of a present past. However, the connection between photography and time is far more complex than the plain concept of past, present and future. When thinking of images, we have come to realize that time can be considered through other qualities such as movement, narrative, metaphor, memory, repetition, processuality and performativity, to name a few possibilities. By understanding that time can be explored outside the physical chronological conventions that are determined by measure and reason, it is possible to enter a symbolic temporal dimension in which subjectivity arises. The subjective expectation and the experiencing of time therefore enable to reflect on the temporality of the unspeakable, or to perceive the instant time as an immeasurable present, as an untimely time. 

Furthermore, the transformation of photography from the analogue to digital medium has introduced other layers of complexity concerning our relationship with time. The idea that photography holds a mortiferous power and relates to notions of immobility, fatality and death, suggested by authors such as Barthes or Sontag, has turned into the idea of motion, speed and excess. Considering the technical age we live in, the relationship between images and time is no longer possible to be analyzed through simple and stable definitions. For instance, theorist Zygmunt Bauman stressed that we live in liquid times, in which our existence is shaped through an endemic state of uncertainty. 

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