The focus on the conditions of production as the mediums specificity has been significant for a long time in order to distinct between these two mediums until the position of the beholder began to disturb modal temporality. It is through the beholder that past becomes to be present and through the beholder the relationship between past and present began to loose his formal boundaries. The question now is: What does the emergence of the beholder as a condition for the image mean for the image‟s temporality? What needs to be changed regarding traditional time models that measure and count time in minutes and seconds? Is instantaneity as a category of photography still useful for the understanding of a photographic image? And how can one think time in the photographic image?
Augustinus, when he was asked: What is time? Answered: If nobody asks me for it, I know it; if I want to explain it to someone asking, I do not know it. What Augustinus said a long time ago is still at stake when we are trying to describe that phenomenon in the 21 st century. Australian philosopher Elisabeth Grosz emphasized the gap between the phenomenon and its verbal description in the following citation: »Time is one of the assumed yet irreducible terms of all discourse, knowledge, and social practice. Yet it is rarely analyzed or self-consciously discussed in its own terms. [...] Time has a quality of intangibility, a fleeting half-life, emitting its duration-particles only in the passing or transformation of objects and events, thus erasing itself as such while it opens itself to movement and change. It has an evanescence, a fleeting or shimmering, highly precarious „identity‟
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that resists concretization, indication or direct representation. Time is more intangible than any other „thing‟, less able to be grasped, conceptually or physically.« (Grosz 1999, p.1)