“You can’t walk into the same river twice, because the new water is constantly arriving.”- this famous aphorism by Heraclitus inspired artists and philosophers for centuries, only to find its way to science, which is becoming more and more poetical and religious because of its fantastic assumptions. What was once the subjective contemplation of an intriguing philosopher known by the nickname of “Heraclitus the Obscure” became the scientific fact today: the World is constantly moving (from the smallest particles to macrocosms). I believe that we often do not realize the visual consequence of this fact. It literally means that in two different moments there cannot be two identical appearances of the World. If we imagine the possibility of taking a photo of the whole World, and we retake the photo every moment, there would not be two same photographies. Regardless of the fact that an experiment such as this is impossible to conduct, this suggests that the parts of the World that are subject to change suffer the same consequences, so the photographies of visually accessible partialized Worlds, taken in different moments, cannot be identical as well.
What is photography actually telling us about the World and time, and about the World in time? The appearance of the photography changes the perception of time in a revolutionary and paradoxical way. Photography makes the time stop. It “crops” the moment from the empty conventional being, taking one specific group of impressions located in space. Those impressions can never again be grouped in the same way and in the specific entity in reality, of our perception of reality, to be precise. (The question if the reality is our relative and subjective perception or “the real” reality perhaps can also be explained using photography as an example: two different people would take a photo of one phenomenon in a two completely different ways. We would have two completely different views of the World, but that is a totally different subject).
As well as the impressions can never form the same picture of the World from some earlier point of view, there can never be two different photographs. The way the impressions are grouped into one entity- a photo, depends on many outer (“real”) and inner (perception of “real”) factors, and all of them make us see those pictures as unique, isolated and unrepeatable. That picture is determent by the moment. Every moment that passes carries away one picture of the given state of reality. If it is not recorded – the picture permanently disappears, forever unnoticed, unknown, forgotten. With the appearance of the photography it became possible that a specific moment, in which the specific picture exists, can be taken as a photography and saved from passing of time.
Provisionally, it is possible to make the moment last in a memory of the participant of the given event. But the moment would still be impermanent transient, as it exists in the memory of a being that is also transient, a human being. The opposite applies: not only that a moment is not spared from the oblivion if it continues to exist in the memory of a person, but the person is also not spared from the oblivion if he or she continues to live as a part of the moment captured by a photographer. The essence of a person cannot be fully captured by photographing their appearance, their mime or pose.
It is interesting how the man’s perception of photography changed. In the beginning people were scared of being photographed because they believed that by materializing their shape on paper their spirit is being imprisoned and lost. Today, on the other hand, people enjoy taking pictures because they now believe that their spirit is persevered that way. People even believe that it is the way to make their persona (illusions people create about themselves using photography are painfully pathetic and I will leave that subject to psychologist). Still, I think it is a poor consolation. Photography can’t help with creating and persevering of a persona over time. I respect the portraits, but I still agree with Milan Mladenović: “People are just spots on pictures”.
What a photo can preserve from time is much more abstract- it is actually the time itself. You have the oposition between two characteristics of time: lasting and being. With the appearance of photography the lasting of moment of time is made possible, and that made the lasting and being equal. The moment is breaking through the net of time, so it can be liberated and able to exist in parallel with time. And by doing so, it doesn’t lose its essence- its transiency isn’t lost. It only became fixed in space. And once it is fixed in space, it lasts through time. Before, it lasted through time, connected with time, along with time; now it lasts through, in opponent of time. That way the moment lasts and exists in spite of time. Photography takes time to two-dimensional space by “freezing” the moment. That way we get imprisoned “sub- time” in “sub- space” (with two-dimensionally limited space).
The sub-reality formed this way (sub-time + sub-space) is a unique form of art, which relates to reality directly. Art was defined as a copy of reality since Plato. From that point of view, photography has the privileged status among the arts, since it copies the reality most directly. All the other forms of art imitate the reality indirectly, and by doing so they change it more or less. Besides, the process of making any other type of art, and the act of receipting them by the audience imply forms that last, and cannot be limited to the moment. Movie, an art that resembles photography the most, acts like its extension- it consists of linked photos. That way, the movie affirms photography, but it annihilates it at the same time, because it takes away its essence, its timelessness (the “frozen moment” effect).
That way, we can understand why the timelessness along with directly copying are the essence of photography as an art- because they are differentiating. At the same time, this is more important than the expression which is etymologically the basis of the word “photography”- drawing by light. Description of photography as the act of drawing by light really is its most important material characteristic, but drawing by time is the essential characteristic of photography.
That way we can see that the photography has the ability to take us places we would not expect to get to. That gives us the possibility to talk about photography as philosophy. That way we can talk about photography as physics. That way we can talk…