Peter Wollen’s Relationship Between Photography and Time

Il Sun Moon

• 3 min read

Photography is like a point,
Film like a line.
— Peter Wollen

Photography near-zero duration and located in an ever-receding ‘then’. At the same time, the spectator’s ‘now’, the moment of looking at the image, has no fixed duration.

Roland Barthes Barthes’ antipathy towards the cinema, which is because his aesthetic is governed by prejudice against linear time and especially against the narrative.

Time

  1. Bernard Comrie’s aspect rather than tense
From: 한국어의 상(aspect)
  • Types of situation, in relation to change (or potential for change) and perspective as well as duration. It is the interlocking of these underlying semantic categories which determines the various aspectual forms taken by verbs in different languages (grosso modo).
    • States
      • Processes
      • Events
        • durative events
        • punctual events. Alongside these categories aspect also involves
    • The concepts of the iterative,
    • The habitual
    • The characteristic.

Photograph’s Captions

사진의 경우 움직이지 않는다, duration도 없다— 비주얼적으로—하지만 그렇다고 해서 그것들이 시간적 속성이 아에 없다는 것은 아니다. 그 예시로 사진이

  • 뉴스 사진 Photography’s captions에서 주로 보이는 non-progressive present (in this case, a narrative present, since the reference is to past time) — events
    ‘What was it like just before and what’s the result going to be?’
  • 사진 아트의 캡션에서는 noun-phrases, lacking verb-forms의 특징을 주로 보인다. — states
    ‘How did it come to be like this or has it always been the same?’
  • 다큐멘터리 사진에서는 progressive present을 종종 찾아볼수 있다. — 대부분 states, 종종 processes
    ‘Is anything going to happen to end or to interrupt this?’
  • 특히나 Muybridge’s 의 사진의 캡션에서는 imperfective가 지속적으로 사용된다. — processes

Lumiere’s L’Arrosseur arrose

  • a man is watering the garden (process)
  • a child comes and stamps on the hose (event)
  • the man is soaked and the garden empty (state)

영화는 Movement 보다는 Squencing으로 이러한 사진적 duration의 흔적을 찾아볼 수 있다.

Barthes의 Camera Lucida 에서 사진은 포즈를 취한 것과 취하지 않은 사진으로 나뉜다. 포즈를 취하지 않은 사진에서는, 그것이 죽어있는 사진이라 할지라도, 그는 죽음을 보지 않는다. 사진에서 사람의 죽음은 state가 아닌 event이다.

Capa photograph of the Spanish Civil War soldier. Spain, 1936.

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