One could argue, that we are nonetheless able to tell what time is when we look at the large history of astronomy or the invention of clocks that measure time in minutes and seconds. But do they not just attempt to control time, and are they not just an instrument for us to store it? What is missing it the irreducible affection that it has on us? But how should we reflect the distance that is incorporated in time? Mere astraction or metasphysical construction is not able to consider our aesthetic experience with time?
The fluctuate character or „passing through“ was one of the points of interests why Gilles Deleuze, following Henri Bergson, began to rethink the phenomenon. He noticed that there has been a revival of thinking time when new technologies such as film enter the world. Starting from various film examples Deleuze thought time as simultaneity, focused on the notion of growing time. Time in the cinematic image is being regarded as simultaneity of past and present, being virtual and actual at the same time. The films of the Nouvelle Vague inspired him to think time as becoming and not as being. He turns the weakening of traditional modal temporality into a kind of time explosion where time is trembling and systems of references or orientations are missing. The ungraspability needs to be seen outside of spatiotemporal coordinates. Without these orientations time is constantly in a state of crudity. In terms of moving images time becomes visible as a generic principle. In the following we should ask, if in Deleuze‟s writings, which are undoubtly connected to film theory, there are also connection points with photography? Can photography - traditionally attached to the moment of time at which it came into existence - be connected to time in its pure state?