Time and the photographic image
The relationship between time and the photographic image has been traditionally seen in many various ways: as narration in the image, as the process between the beholder and the image, or as time that is related to the construction of the image. Throughout the history of modern theory of photography there has been a consensus that the photograph has been a static object, a frozen moment in time. A photograph that has been taken in the past, is a brief and short moment of time that is necessarily regarded as one of its decisive characteristics. That is why Siegfried Kracauers well known book Theory of Film turns nowadays out to be almost conventional – in regards to contemporary philosophy of time. While looking for theoretical distinctions between film and photography he describes the former as a series of movement and the latter as a cut into time. Film is being regarded as a sequence of movement, therefore more able to achieve a higher synthesis of life as it “represents reality as it evolves in time” (Kracauer 1960, p. 41), while photography is “essentially associated with the moment of time at which it came into existence” (Kracauer 1960, p. 19). What can be remarked as a first aspect is that compared to photography film has a different pictorial mediation between past and presence. How can we depict such a relation?