Tomorrow Forever, Photography as Decay
“The Time of Photography”
Carl Aigner
Kunsthalle Krems, Dumont 1999
"Thus, for me, photography becomes a strange medium, a new form of hallucination: false at the level of perception, true at the level of time ..."
Roland Barthes
Every society, we can say, produces the forms of time it implicitly needs to secure its identity and existence within its particular constellation. Thus, it aligns with the perspective of the Mexican writer Octavio Paz, who in his Indian memoirs, suggests that we can only understand a society if we know how it deals with time.
With the culmination of the Western secularization process in the 19th century through the technicization of space and time, a fundamental transformation of European society occurred, shifting from an agrarian to an industrial society where dynamization and acceleration became essential modes of existence. The annihilation of space and the gaining of time became a constitutive factor in a society increasingly defined by speed (“dromologizing,” as Paul Virilio puts it). This transformation led to a new “Copernican” turn in the second half of the last century, from a heliocentric to a chronocentric worldview, simultaneously inverting the dominance relationship between space and time.
The technical development that led to the apparatus-driven nature of European culture also resulted in a new relationship with time, driving the first (telecommunicative) wave of media influence in a society undergoing urbanization and industrialization. Considering the significance of images in European culture since the Renaissance, there is a close relationship between time, images, and society. In a media society, we can generalize that time is significantly shaped by (image) media, which scan, rhythmize, and produce perceptions and experiences of time as new, genuine phenomena.
The invention of photography in the 19th century played a decisive role in the pictorial mediation of time. As the first apparatus-based image medium, it not only industrialized the world of images and revolutionized both the concept of the image and art, but also inscribed itself in the relationship between society, image, and time in a new way due to its unique materiality (the photochemical emulsion). No other image medium is as closely intertwined with the factor of time as photography; as the “writing of light,” it transformed classical image-time into the first time-image in the history of images.
Photographic images are intricately interwoven with time. On one hand, they drive and express the acceleration of a chronocratic society by representing the fastest mode of image production until the invention of film. On the other hand, their capacity for representation holds the potential to visually suspend time, providing a temporal balance to societal acceleration and constant change. The inherent inscription of time in photographic images, due to the light-sensitive chemical layer (which also synchronizes the moments of capture and display), enables new pictorial forms of time. What emerges is time as an image, reflected in the light. Time is no longer a spatial constant but, as an effect of light, the result of the speed of light itself. Time, as a phenomenon of light, transforms into light-time. The photographic exposure, as the time of illumination, becomes the primary constitution of the image, situating the priority of (image) time over (image) space.
Through the specificities of photographic technology, a process of pictorializing time was initiated, effectively working on both the level of representation and time itself for the first time. Beyond the notion of fixed time by photography, photographic temporality constructs new forms of time perception closely linked to the process of making visible. As illuminated time, the representation itself becomes a materialized light-time phenomenon. Photography, as the first chronography, became the instrument that could visually address the problem of time in and since the 19th century. Light and movement, thought of as a dialectical entity, became the key coefficients of new temporal dispositifs, decisively determining the relationship between society, image, and time up to the present day. For this reason, the time of photography, in light of new temporal turbulences, holds significant relevance in contemporary artistic discourse as an anticipated future: Tomorrow Forever.