How much honesty can a photograph hold?
“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do”, Andy Warhol once said. I don’t normally think much of the pictures I take, I don’t treat them the way I do with art. Unlike art, I don’t write about photographs.
If this picture were a film still, it captures a non-scene, a non-event. It captures nothing and many things that you won’t read just by looking at the picture. Freeze frame. Timestamp. Archive. Overwriting my memories was out of the question. I found that even my wildest fantasies were incapable of doing that.
Like a picture that never changes.
…motion without change, acceleration without progress, stillness without stability, uniformity without permanence, retrospective without reflection, nostalgia without the tenderness of sentimentality, my refusal to part with familiarity against my amnesia. It’s not what we normally associate with time.
And yet, I thought about the answer to making up for lost time in a different quality of time: time dilation, in special relativity, “is the 'slowing down' of a clock as seen by an observer in relative motion with respect to that clock.” It seems counter-intuitive. We are told to slow down so as not to let life pass you by. But I see this picture where I was waiting, and more than waiting to get home and call it a day, I was waiting for what I didn’t know, waiting for something good to happen in the story where I am denied redemption, consolation, or at the very least, closure that I thought I deserved.
Waiting did not change that.
Read/listen to full article on Medium: https://medium.com/@nicolelasquety/unstill-life-hyperfuture-series-5e61fe48e583
“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do”, Andy Warhol once said. I don’t normally think much of the pictures I take, I don’t treat them the way I do with art. Unlike art, I don’t write about photographs.
If this picture were a film still, it captures a non-scene, a non-event. It captures nothing and many things that you won’t read just by looking at the picture. Freeze frame. Timestamp. Archive. Overwriting my memories was out of the question. I found that even my wildest fantasies were incapable of doing that.
Like a picture that never changes.
…motion without change, acceleration without progress, stillness without stability, uniformity without permanence, retrospective without reflection, nostalgia without the tenderness of sentimentality, my refusal to part with familiarity against my amnesia. It’s not what we normally associate with time.
And yet, I thought about the answer to making up for lost time in a different quality of time: time dilation, in special relativity, “is the 'slowing down' of a clock as seen by an observer in relative motion with respect to that clock.” It seems counter-intuitive. We are told to slow down so as not to let life pass you by. But I see this picture where I was waiting, and more than waiting to get home and call it a day, I was waiting for what I didn’t know, waiting for something good to happen in the story where I am denied redemption, consolation, or at the very least, closure that I thought I deserved.
Waiting did not change that.
Read/listen to full article on Medium: https://medium.com/@nicolelasquety/unstill-life-hyperfuture-series-5e61fe48e583
“Unstill Life”
(Self portrait)
Oil on canvas
18” x 24”
2023
