Art of Photography at the End of Temporality

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Philosophy of Photography

Volume 3 Number 1 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.3.1.121_1

POP 3 (1) pp. 121139 Intellect Limited 2012

K ywo sart photography temporality instantaneous

photography Frederic Jamesonformalismdigitization

Ben BurBridgeUniversity of Sussex

A t photo aphy at th e ofT mpo al ty

Abst actThis article examines a strain of contemporary art photography marked by its resemblance to earlier scitific motion studies as indicative of a wider scientific turn in recent photographic art. Focusing on Sa

Pickerings seriesExplosions (2008), Denis DarzacqsThe Fall (2006), Ori Gershts Blow Up (2007) and Martin Klimas Flower Vases (2008), it addresses the conditions that have allowed for forms anmethodologies associable with earlier scientific imagery to be reshaped as contemporary art, particularly large-scale of recent museum photography and its self-conscious indeterminacy of meaning. Adoptinschematic approach based on the identification of similarity, I examine the implications of ambiguity ascale as inherent qualities of the work, along with the interpretations that the projects examined sha

Noting a potential formalism in artists repeated isolation of frozen motion, I anchor this interest in tmedium-specific qualities of photography in two changes associated with digitization. Where digital p

production has placed pressure on traditional ontological understandings of the medium, the projects shown to offer a nostalgic return to purer forms of photographic production. Drawing on Fredric Jameso

2003 essay, The end of temporality, I conclude by considering how the photographs may be implicatewider transformations to the construction and experience of time under late-capitalism.


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work, they have not been subject to any detailed analysis. Neither have the similarities between the various art projects been explored.

The links I go on to outline raise a number of questions; for example: Why have earlier tech-niques of picture production appealed to artists? What happens to forms of photography associable

with nineteenth-century science as a result of their reconfiguration as art? What forms of knowledgeare produced by such images, and what types of subjectivity do they allow for? More broadly, whatdo these approaches suggest to be true about photographys current place in the art world? To answerthese questions, it is necessary to address specific links between the uses of photography in recentart and earlier science, along with what makes them distinct. It is also necessary to look at the widersocial, cultural and technological contexts from which the practices emerged, paying particularattention to two key changes associated with digitization: the post-production of photography inPhotoshop, and the experience of time under late-capitalism.

i st m tal a sth t csThe use of short exposures to suspend moving bodies in time and space is not unique to the scientificanalysis of motion. Such techniques have long occupied a wide span of photographic production,particularly within the art-orientated form of photojournalism described by Cartier-Bresson in termsof the decisive moment (Jussim 1989: 52). The specific parallels I am suggesting depend on fiveadditional elements that, to a greater or lesser extent, are harnessed in combination in each of theprojects under consideration here. Links can be drawn through the types of subject matter depicted.Darzacq shows human subjects moving at speed in a manner similar to Muybridges obsessivestudies of human and animal locomotion (Muybridge 1887b). Gersht and Klimas document theimpact of explosive devices, or of a moving object as it collides with a stationary one, suggestingparallels with Edgertons photographs of bullets passing through apples, light bulbs and playing

cards, or Worthingtons studies of the splashes created by falling objects entering a liquid surface(Edgerton and Killian 1939; Worthington 1908).The subjects are photographed in such a way that emphasis is placed on the action itself, rather

than the context in which it occurred, distancing the work from Cartier-Bressons decisive moment, where the documentary function of the picture usually demands its subject be shown within specificand identifiable environments. This is clearest in the work of Gersht and Klimas, which deploysplain backdrops in studio settings, but is also true though less so of Pickering and Darzacq,owing to the repetitive nature of the exterior environments shown, and the lack of distinctive featuresthat would otherwise distract from the action depicted. 2 The contemporary images are also markedby a formal consistency across the series, with subjects photographed from similar distances andpositioned centrally within the frame. Here, the series recall the visual languages of earlier conceptual

2. Compare, for example,the numerouscontextual details inCartier-Bressons iconicParis, Gare St Lazare,1932and the repetitiveand non-descriptsettings encountered inDarzacqs series.


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art. In an influential essay, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have linked similar methods of fram-ing encountered in nineteenth-century scientific imagery to the constitution of mechanical objectiv-ity during the period. This non-interventionist trope is said to be related to subjectivity as wax toseal, requiring that aspects of the personal be censured and the subjectivity of scientific andaesthetic judgement be overcome (Daston and Galison 1992: 82). The contemporary work insti-gates a related, if paradoxical, mode of subjectivity, through the decisions to replicate the pictorialcharacteristics of objectivity within a discursive space that is more often associated with aestheticdecisions and creative expression. The evacuation of subjectivity becomes a stylistic device.

The actions shown are either choreographed by the artists for the camera as in the work ofKlimas, Gersht and Darzacq or are photographed in such a way that th\ey appear to have been so,given the absence of any clear indication of the practical reasons for their occurrence. Pickeringfocuses on the explosions taking place in nondescript landscapes, rather than the clients, salesmenand demonstration teams that would provide her images with an overtly documentary function.This has led Karen Irvine to describe Pickering as fascinated by the potential of the camera to atonce record the real and abstract it (Irvine 2010: 7). These explosions are, furthermore, staged forthe express purpose of being viewed by potential clients. In consequence, the photographs share anair of experimental staging, linking them to what Elizabeth Edwards has described as a growingtrend in nineteenth-century laboratory practice to replicate the actualities of the physical, empiri-cally experienced world in controlled conditions that allowed for their analysis (Edwards 1997: 58).

Finally, some of the technologies and methodologies deployed by artists hark back to the nine-teenth and early twentieth-century pursuit of instantaneous images. The photography historiansPhillip Prodger and Martha Braun have each examined how the desire to analytically study motionhad fuelled the creation of faster shutters, increasingly sensitive chemicals and the use of flashphotography, reducing exposure times to the merest fraction of a second (Braun 1997: 1586; Prodger2003: 24112). While Darzacq and Pickering simply deploy the fastest available exposure times on

their cameras, Klimas and Gersht synchronize flashes with the rapid motion of their subject usingsound triggers and electrical devices, in a manner that directly recalls the earlier procedures ofEdgerton. In Gershts series, in which a bank of cameras is used to produce a series of photographsin quick succession, the links with Muybridges work are clearer still. 3

Such similarities are accompanied by significant differences, relating to the production, presen-tation and display of the photographs. Whereas the majority of earlier scientific images were encoun-tered as small-scale, black and white prints and reproductions in books, case studies and journals,art photography now usually assumes the form of large-scale colour prints, displayed in frames orbehind Perspex on the walls of galleries and modern art museums. 4 This provides the photographs

with an immersive element, taken by some critics as symptomatic of a more general spectacularizationof contemporary art. 5 The effect exploited by photographers is described by Julian Stallabrass in

3. A colleague described a visit to Gershts studioas akin to entering ascientic laboratory.

4. All the artists haveexhibited photographsat well over a metre inheight.

5. A number of papers onthis theme were givenat 2007 conference,Rethinking Spectacleat Tate Modern.


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terms of the data sublime: the experience of a chaotically complex and immensely large configura-tion of data acting much as renditions of mountain scenes and stormy seas did on the nineteenth-century viewer (Stallabrass 2007: 8283). Whereas the practical usefulness of photography to earlyscience relied in part on the diminishing of scale to obscure inessential constituents, recent artistspush photography in the opposite direction: providing an excess of information and asserting thephysical presence of the photograph as object (Lynch 1985: 37; Bryson 1996: 52).

Earlier motion studies aimed to regulate the engagement of viewers through the ways in whichsubjects were represented, the relationship of photographs to one another, and the additional infor-mation provided. This included extended captions, charts, diagrams, written explanations and drawnillustrations. Bruno Latour has described such combinations in terms of information trans-formation:the ways mediators align one another and choose what will remain constant through transforma-tions and what may be discarded (Latour 1998: 424). Muybridge famously deployed a battery ofcameras to produce series of photographs in rapid succession, showing the different phases ofmotion as though a set of stationary poses. These were reproduced together in grids, demanding the

viewer read phases of movement from left to right and top to bottom, much like a written text(Snyder 1997: 396). Similar methods of production and presentation are encountered in photographsby Worthington, Londe, Anschutz and Kolrausch. Where an analysis of movement demanded anindication of temporal and spatial change, Edgertons use of photography to document the impactof a fast-moving projectile upon a stationary object or surface could be achieved through a singlepicture. Such concerns are evident in the timing of the photographs, showing the precise moment ofimpact, or the moment immediately afterwards. In either case, both the projectile and its targetappear, representing cause and effect within a single image. Captions for the earlier photographsusually described both the specific subject and motion depicted Athletes Boxing, Bullet PassingThrough Candle Flame, and so on while written information clarified the distances represented inthe photographs and the length of each exposure time. This translated the empirical data of the

image into a series of numerical quantities (Jeffrey 2010: 5257). While Martin Klimas subject closely resembles that of Edgerton showing the effects of a 9mmsteel bulletshot through the base of the vase (Klimas 8 May 2010 interview) the photographsare timed in such a way that only the vase is depicted, leaving the precise cause of its obliterationunexplained. Pickering and Gersht show the effects of explosives, further obscuring a visualindication of cause. The majority of these artists produce a single image for each of the actionsdepicted, which are brought together in series to create a typology of different, related effects. The

viewer is encouraged to compare the visual forms of the frozen movements or explosions, much likea series of sculptures. Only Gersht produced sets of images of a single action in rapid succession inthe manner of Muybridge, but significantly these are not displayed in ways that correspondspatially to the chronology of their production.


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Captions for the recent artworks usually adopt generic series titles, with individual photographsnumbered as derivatives. These descriptions generally relate either to the action or the subject, ratherthan the relationship between the two. There is no effort to further explain what is shown, ortranslate this into alternative, numerical systems of representation. While debate may continueregarding the particular artistic credentials of a photographer such as Muybridge (Braun 1992:22862; Brookman 2010), it is not my aim to state unequivocally whether the earlier photographsbelong to art or science. Rather I hope it is demonstrated that, unsurprisingly, all aspects of thepictures initial production and contextualization allowed them to function in a considerably morescientific fashion than the examples of art photography which, in other ways, resemble them.

i t p t v t apsThis under-determination of meaning opens the contemporary projects to multiple interpretations.Gershts pictures of exploding flowers bear a clear resemblance to earlier photographs produced byMuybridge and Edgerton, which suggests a very different response to that of an Israeli military Chiefof Staff, for whom they carried associations with suicide bombers (Gersht 4 June 2010 interview).Elsewhere, the project has been seen as a contemporary take on the still life tradition, and a symbolicmeditation on the dialectic of destruction and creation in western civilization (Wright 2007; Wainwright 2007: 41). It is potentially all or none of these things. The majority of interpretationsprompted by the recent projects similarly swing between the specific and the symbolic: Pickerings work serves as a document of the artificial explosives and their demonstration, and a comment onthe place of the simulacrum in western culture (Irvine 2006: 69; Gavin 2007: 196); Darzacqs serieshas been praised as a collaboration with young street dancers, an allusion to 9/11, and a metaphorfor Paris fallen inner city youths following the riots in the city in 2005 (Chrisafis 2007; Jauffret 2006:24). In every case, the excavation of such meanings relies upon information other than that provided

in the photographs or their captions.The way in which meaning depends in significant ways on the knowledge and experiences ofa particular viewer, is underlined by the artists in interview, who posit a potential to generate a variety of interpretations as essential to the vitality of their work. Gersht would like peoples firstencounter with the work to be purely visual . the past, present and future for these images isapplied by whoever looks at them (Gersht 4 June 2010 interview). Pickering has suggested that it isreally important not to close all the doors, not to make something so watertight in terms of what thestrategy is that theres no room for creative interpretation by the viewer (Pickering 22 June 2010interview). Darzacq is keen to foreground the fact that you can read into these photos whatever you want (quoted Chrisafis 2007). The uncertainty of meaning can be seen to answer a basic structuralneed: marking the photographs as art through a seeming opposition to the distinct and specific


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functions prescribed for photography elsewhere in culture (Bourdieu 1965). This adds a furtherdimension to the pictures resemblance to scientific imagery. By coupling painstaking and oftenhighly specialized modes of production with an uncertainty regarding function and meaning, artistscreate an aestheticized parody of instrumentalism, intense in its labour and, consequently, one wayto demonstrate their own artistic freedom. Such freedom appears to extend to the viewer, who canexercise subjectivity in ways prohibited by the production and contextualization of the earlier motionstudies. The assumption underscoring this supposed enfranchisement can be reversed, however, if

we note that it positions ignorance as enabling, and information as incarcerating. In this case, view-ers are placed in a weaker position to judge the photographs than those associated with science,since the decision is made not to explain what it is they represent.

For Stallabrass, the potential for multiple readings, indeterminacy and a revulsion at essentialismfeeds an industry based on the interpretation of artworks. Academics and writers produce a steadyand ongoing stream of responses, as further meanings are excavated, contested, dispensed withand revived (Stallabrass 2010: 27). My schematic approach marks an effort to work against the post-modern mysticism promoted by the work, along with the monographic focus on artists practicesthat continue to shape the majority of work in this field. Grouping examples of art photographytogether based on elements they share, it is possible to note the fact that indeterminacy constitutesan inherent quality of the work. It is also possible to consider the common intentions andinterpretations that unite the projects.

Pickering has described how she became fascinated by the suspended moment in time(quoted in Jaeger 2008: 20); Klimas has discussed the cameras ability to discover an unknownpart of the world (Klimas 8 May 2010 interview); and Gersht has described his interest in how,through the technological devices of photography, the limits of what we can see and experienceof the world are expanded how photography can alleviate this moment from the rest (Gersht4 June 2010 interview). Such sentiments are echoed in a number of published responses, which

note an interest in what Brian Dillon described as the nature of the photographic instant as acentral component of the projects (Dillon 2007: 11; Barrett-Lennard 2008; Dvkstra 2007: 25;Harder 2008). Particularly when viewed in the light of such comments, the resemblance of the

work to earlier motion studies can be understood in relation to the specific capacities theydemonstrate to be true of photography as a medium. Through the formal consistency of theimages and the absence of actions and contexts that would otherwise distract from the frozenmotion depicted, the photographs underline what John Szarkowski once described as the isola-tion of a single moment, in which photographers have found an inexhaustible subject(Szarkowski 1966: 100). At the core of these practices sits the repeated and insistent presentationof the cameras capacity to suspend motion as stasis, frozen moments shown as constellations ofstriking visual effects.


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M cha cal cl chsIn order to resist the usual effects of such formalism, it is necessary to anchor an interest in the medi-um-specific qualities of photography in factors existing outside the image. Two aspects, particularly,make up the ontological pairing at the heart of the formalist tendency that concerns us here: photog-raphy and time. Each has been unsettled, reconfigured or transformed as a result of an increasinglydigital culture. Several texts written in response to the recent work have noted the absence of digitalmanipulation in achieving its pictorial effects. Where one writer described the light-hearted magic ofPickerings tricksters prestidigitalisation (Gopnik 2006), Darzacqs work has been said to explorethe idea of the body in levitation, using straight photography and no Photoshop tricks (Barrett-Lennard 2008). The artist has attributed this point to the fact they probably like that what looks as if

it is impossible is real (Darzacq 27 May 2010 interview). Gersht has explained that it is really impor-tant for me how light interacts with the technology, how this creates this optical effect (Gersht 4 June2010 interview). Continuing in this vein, Martin Klimas has suggested his work should be viewed asreal photographic images because there is no manipulation (quoted Baldwin 2007), going on todescribe the use of digital post-production as a symbiosis between painting and photography thatrepresents its own genre to be seen with other rules (Klimas 8 May 2010 interview).

Scholarly discussion around digital photography has, until fairly recently, centred on the impactof digital post-production upon the relationship of photography and the real (Rubinstein and Sluis2008: 10). While early accounts proved keen to assert the radical changes that such technologiesentailed (Wombell 1991; Haworth-Booth 1994), they were countered by more tempered analyses,focused on potential continuities between the use of computer software and older forms of photo-graphic manipulation and retouching (Rosler 2004; Sorensen 2006). The digital post-production ofimages was also shown to have specific ramifications for photographys relationship to time. ForGeoffrey Batchen, photography had been distinct from other media due to its depiction of objects infixed relations at a given moment in real time (Batchen 1997: 9094). The type of digital temporalitydescribed by Fred Ritchin in his 2009 book, After Photography , is therefore closer to that attributed byBatchen to drawing or painting, with subsequent sets of interventions in the image introducing anew and uncertain duration to the creation of photographs (Ritchin 2009: 2829). Although debatesabout digitization may, in recent years, have moved away from the real, and onto issues surroundingthe networked image (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008: 925), the frequent references to the manipula-tion of the image in Photoshop by artists and writers associated with the scientific turn indicates theextent to which concerns regarding the veracity of photography after digitization shaped art prac-tices during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Artists embrace of photographically frozen motion suggests the effects of such changes in two ways. In a general sense, the pictures provide a pronounced demonstration of photographys unique


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relation to the real, for here is a whole world of previously unseen rapid motion that only the shortexposure times of photography can reveal (Killian 1939: 7). More specifically, the repeated deploy-ment of very short exposures across series marked by their strict formal and aesthetic consistencyunderlines photographys distinct temporal character, proposing an ontological understandingmodelled according to the cameras mechanical origins. Viewed in relation to the manipulated digitalimage, the work is driven by a reactionary impulse, reasserting the extraordinary effects that can beachieved through purely mechanical means. The representation of these forms as art world noveltiesat a time when they are well-worn clichs, suggests both nostalgia for modernist wonder, and aturning away from the new possibilities provided by computers. Consequently, the work can belinked to a wider set of practices, concerned with the materiality of the photograph as object andantiquated printing processes, which have found favour with collectors, galleries and museums inrecent years. 6

The discussion of the work by artists and writers indicates the extent to which the effects ofdigitization cannot be so straightforwardly set aside. Extra-photographic reassurances that thepictures were created without Photoshop hint at a shift in the collective understanding of photographyand the degree of manipulation to which all photographs are now potentially prone (Ritchin 2009:2450). The insecurity apparent in the artists statements indicates the effects of such a change,through the implicit suggestion that, when presented with photographs depicting phenomenausually invisible to the naked eye, viewers may assume this to be the creation of the computer, notthe camera. This marks a further contrast to the earlier scientific imagery, linking the functions the

work first served to wider contexts. Where earlier motion studies relied on the perceived objectivityof the camera to verify the truthfulness of their revelations and to show what the eye could not see,the contemporary viewer is assumed to be more hesitant about accepting any similar claim (Snyder1997: 37985; Nickel 2000: 38). If the work invokes an older understanding of photographicpossibility, unaffected by digital post-production, the suspicion of digital forms of manipulation

must first be assuaged.

Th of t mpo al ty? While changes to photographic technologies may go some way to explaining the projects medium-specific concerns, any such effort to position photography albeit photographic technology as atotalizing interpretive horizon still risks the slide into formalism. To advance the analysis further, itis necessary to look outside photography altogether, somewhere nonetheless that represents morecollective forms of experience than that of an individual viewer. The most obvious possibility lies in

what Batchen described as the pervasive suspicion that we are entering a time when it will nolonger be possible to tell the original from its simulation (Batchen 1997: 303). In which case, a stress

6. Recent exhibitionsof this work includeShadow Catchers(V&A, London, 2010)and The New Alche-mists(London Art Fair,2012).


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on photographys indexical dimension could be taken as representative of a Baudrillardian anxiety.Rather than contribute my voice to the existing postmodern chatter concerning the simulacrum,I take my lead again from the earlier motion studies, and address recent art photography inrelation to the constitution and experience of time.

In a 2004 book, sociologist Barbara Adam described changes from an embodied, experientialunderstanding of time as growth and ageing, seasonal variation, to the machine time thataccompanied industrialization. This shifted the experience and meaning of time towards invari-ability, quantity and precise motion expressed by numbers (Adam 2004: 11314). As a quantity,time became both an essential parameter in scientific investigation, and an economic resourcethat could be allocated, spent or saved: an abstract value that could be exchanged for otherabstract values such as money (Adam 2004: 115). The shift towards a mechanized understandingof time was embodied by the increased presence of clocks in the nineteenth century and,particularly, the standardization of temporality through a series of measures that stretch from theintroduction of Greenwich Mean Time in Britain in 1880 to the first global transmission of a timesignal from on top of the Eiffel Tower on 1 July 1913 (Solnit 2003: 2324; Adam 2004: 11417).For Scott Lash and John Urry, the mastery of nature through which all sorts of phenomena,practices and places became subjected to the dizembedding, centralising and universalisingmarch of time represented a central component of industrialized modernity (Lash and Urry1994: 229). For E. P. Thompson, clock time was critical to the constitution of industrial capitalism(Thompson 1967: 5797).

Photography emerged from the same industrial context, and the dissection of time by the photo-graphic image provided visual form to the wider efforts to divide temporality into increasingly stand-ardized units (Haworth-Booth 1994: 4). This is particularly clear in the uses made of photography bythe likes of Muybridge and Marey, as they broke motion down into its constituent phases, andsubjected it to precise forms of measurement and analysis (Creswell 2006: 35). As Rebecca Solnit has

suggested, the photographs shifted understandings from the mysteries of nature to the manageablemechanics of industrialism (Solnit 2003: 183). Central to this industrial logic was a definition of timein terms of quantification and succession, cause and effect, as the components of movement werestudied in relation to one another. This suggests links with enlightenment narratives of humanprogress, which saw the predetermined sequence of history as following the lead of reason andthe impulse of productive forces (Castells 1996: 447). For Martha Braun, the photographsprovided the means through which laws governing the physical world were understood, harnessingand transforming energy and so leading to the progress of society (Braun 1992: 374). We can alsothink about the ways in which the dissection of physical activity into constituent phases in pursuit ofgreater efficiency heralds the coming of early twentieth-century Fordism and the rhythm of theproduction line.


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In our post-industrial, late-capitalist era, the experience of time is said to have changed again, aspostmodern theories trade in notions of tele-presence (Virilio 1997: 4), timeless time (Castells1996: 479), or the end of temporality (Jameson 2003). For Fredric Jameson, writing in 2003, post-modernity is marked by an evacuation of narrative, itself a symptom of the collapse of alternativemodels to the capitalist system, and the concepts of historical progress they encouraged (Jameson2003: 69599; Anderson 1992: 279375). Lacking such narratives, society is said to have beenenveloped by an uncritical present. This existential shift is linked both to socio-economic changes,and the technologies that have shaped, and been shaped, by them. Where post-industrial forms of

work have replaced industrial labour, a convulsive shift in our mapping of reality is said to haveoccurred

that tends to deprive people of their sense of producing that reality, to confront them withthe fact of pre-existing circuits without agency, to condemn them to a world of sheer passivereception.

(Jameson 2003: 702)

The dematerialization of capital and the expansion of the financial market have similarly replacedolder capitalist cycles with the hourly fluctuations of the global stock-market and an anxious dailyconsultation of the listings. In an era of modern communication technologies, the mobile phonehas replaced the diary, and rolling television news feeds of current events reported in real-time have been substituted for more detailed and reflective forms of journalism. As a result of suchchanges, some new non-chronological and non-temporal patterns of immediacies have come intobeing. This has reduced the experience of time to a perpetual present. Its incoherence is a functionof the loss of any collective past or future to which it can be opposed (Jameson 2003: 70407).

Efforts to describe the experience of temporality in terms of totalizing shifts must be treated with

caution, as a result of their tendency to exaggerate the pervasiveness of new technology and down-play the persistence of older forms of temporality (Jameson warns against any such lapse intohistoricism). A measured analysis is more likely to describe the experience of time in terms of thecomplex processes of layering outlined by Eviatar Zerubavel in her book Time Maps: seasonal changeand the rising of the sun coexisting with the ticking hands of the clock, the real-time produced byinformation technologies and aspects of the media, alongside a range of further temporal modelsshaped by various social and cultural factors (Zerubavel 2003). The value of postmodern analyseslies, rather, in the general acceleration of culture they describe in relation to specific technologicalchanges, and the effort to link this to a synthetic account of a shifting capitalist system. This provesparticularly useful here as a framework within which to address art photography as a symptom of

wider cultural transformations.


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On the face of it, the examples of art photography discussed position themselves in oppositionto the experience of temporality described by Jameson in two important ways. First, they invoke anolder, mechanical model of time through formal and methodological resemblances to earlier motionstudies. In these terms, the work involves the type of nostalgic quality discussed above, opening adiscreet space for photography as art through efforts to resist or provide counterpoints to contempo-raneous cultural changes. Second, we can think about the ways in which contemporary art isencountered in a physical sense. The presentation of static, framed, large-format photographs onthe white expanses of gallery or museum walls arguably encourages a slower and more contemplativeform of encounter to that set in place by the rapid proliferation of images in the neo-liberal media-sphere. In this way, recent practices pursue the standard endorsement of video art as a mode ofresistance to a generally accelerated culture (Pere 1988: 2128). Yet this familiar and apparentlystraightforward line of argument is limited by its failure to account for the manner in which theforms of understanding promoted by such work impact on the experience and construction of time.It is through the reconfiguration of mechanical instantaneity as contemporary art world spectaclethat Jamesons model finds its purchase.

In a 2006 article, Mary-Anne Doane set out to query Jamesons efforts to identify culturalsymptoms of postmodern temporality in the popular action film: a genre he describes as violencepornography due to the evacuation of plot or narrative content in favour a succession of explosiveand self-sufficient moments of violence (Doane 2006: 2338; Jameson 2003: 714). By focusing oncinema a medium defined by its inscription of movement Jameson is said to neglect the morepertinent demonstration of a perpetual and violent present in the instantaneous photographs ofMuybridge and Marey. So the abruptness and agressivity of the snapshot is linked to the succes-sion of explosive and self-sufficient moments of violence described by Jameson: the problem,approached by way of instantaneous photography, becoming how to theorize the instant (Doane2006: 38). The dates of the motion studies destabilize an understanding of such qualities as a

distinctive characteristic of time as experienced under late-capitalism. If we find evidence of the endof temporality in the nineteenth-century snapshot, how can we claim it as the exclusive property ofpostmodernism? (Doane 2006: 2838).

The principal shortcoming of Doanes manoeuvre lies in an exclusive concentration on the onto-logical character of individual images, when early motion studies also deployed instantaneity as atool: what Thomas Kuhn described in terms of a means rather than an end (Kuhn 1977: 34142).Leland Stanford commissioned Muybridge not only to create an instantaneous photograph, but toreveal the gait of the horse at a gallop and thereby correct previous assumptions regarding equinelocomotion (Muybridge 1881). Mareys representations were from the outset driven by efforts todevelop understandings about energy transferral (Braun 1992: 515). Edgerton was first of all a scien-tist and an electrical engineer (Kirlian 1937: 21). These practices were concerned with instantaneity,


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certainly, but rarely as an exclusive or autonomous goal. For a recent writer such as Solnit, earlymotion studies constituted the bare essence of a narrative (Solnit 2003: 193), a point indicative of aconcern with causation, succession and explanation, rather than the total evacuation of narrativeoutlined by Jameson. Doanes reading of Muybridge relies on a process of de-contextualization thatreplicates the formalist fate of many scientific photographs. It neglects the instrumental functions ofthe pictures in favour of an ontological characterization of individual images: an account of whatphotography does or is , rather than how specific photographs have been used.

Reflecting on a similar tendency, Ian Jeffrey described how

Muybridges insight was that photography by itself adduced an idea of raw material...completed and complemented by all those directors notations. Without the crucialtime-interval with its associated scripts and digits the originating scene would be, in effect,homeless. It is to this unsupported state that a lot of recent photography (Lise Safarti, RinkeDijkstra) has returned.

(Jeffrey 2010: 57)

The parallel drawn here, between the formalist de-contextualization of instrumental forms ofimagery and the indeterminacy of meaning favoured by contemporary art photographers, is particu-larly telling with regard to the projects I have addressed, which have wilfully stripped instantaneityof its explanatory contexts and so, too, of an overt narrative function. It is here that the full implica-tions of the prioritization of effect over cause and the obscurantism of recent art photography can berecognized. In the most fundamental sense, the work presents the viewer with a constellation of

violent instances without an indication of reason or cause, sets of images denied chronology at thelevel of production as well as display. They suspend their violent subjects in a perpetual present,enlarged to spectacular proportions. Concealed beneath a veil of high-minded interpretation exists a

fireworks display, which couples pyrotechnic showmanship and the well-rehearsed effects resultingfrom photographic instantaneity.Rather than open the world to new ways of seeing, does this work repackage violence pornogra-

phy in the slick, large-scale colour clothing of contemporary art photography; pitching the plotlessaction genre at the higher end of a cultural marketplace? Or, if not a direct equivalent, do they speakof a similar cultural condition? While one writer has described Gershts work as an unforgettable andpainterly image of the apocalypse (Wright 2007), another admires the sheer spectacle and wizardry ofhis accomplishment (Dambrot 2008: 138). Viewed in the light of Jamesons analysis, it is possible thatthese projects serve a final, critical function, by reflecting neo-liberal culture on itself, as in a blackmirror. This may be so, but how can one definitively discern the symptom and its imitation, when bothadopt such spectacular form? The production of the artists series punctuates the period immediately


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preceding the global financial crash in 2008. Now that neo-liberalism falters, but no clear alternativesappear, it may be apposite to question whether artists will assist in the formulation of bright futures, orelse continue to make beautiful fetishes of an incapacity to move beyond the present.

Ack owl m tsI would like to thank Sara Knelman, Julian Stallabrass and Kathryn DelBoccio, who offered commentson a draft of this article from which I have benefitted greatly. I have presented parts of the article aspapers at the University of Sussex and to Ph: The Photography Research Network, where furtheruseful feedback was provided.

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pp. 121139, doi: 10.1386/pop.3.1.121_1

Contributor detailsBen Burbridge is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex, where he teaches the historyand theory of photography and post-war American and European Art . His research focuses on rela-tionships between photographys artistic and instrumental applications, and how the medium is


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implicated in wider social, cultural and political transformations. He is the co-curator of the 2012Brighton Photo Biennial and a forthcoming exhibition examining the legacies of early scientificphotography, opening at the Science Museum in Spring 2013. Burbridge is co-editor of Photoworksmagazine and the co-founder of Ph, a collective of thirty early-career UK academics working withphotography (see www.EitherAnd.org).

Ben Burbridge has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to beidentified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


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Figure 1: Rendering, Highbury Stadium development, London, 2005.


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