/// AND IN THE MEANTIME,
is the immediate response that comes to mind upon hearing the exhibition’s title, I need more time. It also marks the beginning of an exploration in our shared meantime – of my writing and of your reading – into WHERE we might actually find time in the exhibited photoworks, and in photography more broadly?
Time – one of photography’s fundamental hallmarks, and the common denominator of the photographs and photoworks presented here – lingers in all of them, despite their seemingly frozen appearance. In this essay, by delving into the logics and philosophies of photography, we will encounter several suggestions about where, specifically, to look for the complex element of time in photographs and photoworks. Yet the key to this question already lies in the essay’s title itself: in the meantime.
The meantime refers to a durational sense of time, as opposed to the common notion of the photographed single moment – an event extracted from the flow of time. The decisive instant – a fraction of a second captured by either digital sensors or light-sensitive materials in analogue processes – has long received attention, particularly since the last century, when handheld cameras with high shutter speeds and very short exposures became common ground. Our dominant focus on the photographed moment – the has-been-there that we see in an image – has often obscured our attention for other forms of time that shape photographic image-making and its circulation. Although the presented photoworks vary widely in technique and subject matter, they collectively contribute to reopening and expanding our perception of temporal dimensions in all kinds of ways.
The Moment before Meantime
The strong emphasis on the initial moment of exposure may be rooted in the literal and etymological meaning of photography as writing with light, derived from the Greek phōs (φῶς) or phōtos (φωτός) for light, and the verb gráphein (γράφειν) for writing. This moment – the genesis of the image – is when light strikes and alters the light-sensitive elements, typically within a camera, thereby "freezing" the instant onto paper, film or into numeric codes. However, the processes that follow this initial light-insemination can take many forms and unfold over varying durations. A photograph, therefore, always contains a meantime, shaped by the process of its creation and its (intended) uses.
To begin with chemical photography – whether film-based or not – this umbrella term embraces already about 150 different processes (since its beginnings in the nineteenth century), each relying on different chemical agents (solutions, materials, substances), their interactions with light, and their respective time requirements. Because of this complexity, I can only offer a very simplified answer regarding the duration of the analogue meantime. Later, I will turn to the meantime of the digital photograph, and of the artificially generated image.
Developing Time
After the initial moment of light hitting the light-sensitive carrier, the exposed material – now containing a latent image – must be developed to produce a visible photographic image. This development process often involves multiple chemical and physical steps: sometimes performed manually, sometimes with machines, and often in darkness. If the photographic process involves a negative (on film or glass), it is even doubled into two distinct stages: first, developing the negative, and then producing the positive print on photographic paper.
Despite the fact that processes giving rise to photographic images are primarily mechanical, chemical, or electronic, we should not overlook the human gestures that precede them – or remain hidden within them. I refer to these gestures as the choreographies of photographing, as exemplified in the carefully staged works of Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs before the moment of shooting, or in Arda Asena’s photographs, where he wears his textile sculptural bodies – thus extending the layered choreography of the entire artistic process by interweaving various media and performative elements, ultimately encapsulated in the form of a photograph.
Alongside these varying choreographies of photographing or shooting, the choreographies of developing are equally crucial to analogue processes. These movements – carried out before or during the image-making process – are invisible to us and only materially recorded by the photograph, yet they always take place in the meantime. When speaking with photographers who still develop their work in the darkroom, one often hears about the skill and sensitivity required to strike a delicate balance between repeatable, precisely timed, and spatially defined routines, and unrepeatable, improvised elements or external factors such as temperature, humidity, and water hardness. To describe this dynamic interplay, I coined the term photochoreography in another essay. Şahin Kaygun recognized early on the potential of the usually hidden in-the-meantime-stage of photographic development by intervening while the Polaroid was still processing for his The Photographer’s Self-Portrait. He used the Polaroid – an icon of unmatched immediacy in the second half of the twentieth century – to reflect his (and, by extension, our) inner psychological processes that shape identity by actively manipulating the internal chemical workings of the instant photograph.
As an example of photoworks that derive from multiple choreographies – of staging, of photographing, and of developing are the American-types by Rodrigo Valenzuela. He celebrates the time, knowledge, and effort that go into his at first-sight abstract American-types in all the steps that lead to these final photoworks: from building studio assemblages to be photographed, to developing the final prints, and making the wooden frames all by his hand – gestures of labour.
Layered Time: Multiple Exposures, Collages, and Generated Images
Artistic experiments and interventions, like in many of the presented photoworks here – ranging from multiple or long exposures, different forms of (digital) collaging, mixing techniques, and hybrid processes – already offer clues as to where we might find time. These layers of interaction accumulate like sedimentary relicts, pointing to time’s passage during the artwork’s creation.
The American art historian Douglas Crimp once described picture-making as a “stratigraphic activity” involving multidimensional layering. He considered the appropriation of – or cross-reference to – other images as forming layers of an artwork that lie beneath it, or more precisely precede it. Making a photowork is thus a process of both material and temporal layering. It entails an accumulation of references: to other images, to the histories they carry, and to the spaces and times in which this layering occurs. Exemplary is Dafna Talmor, who reconfigures for her ongoing project Constructed Landscapes her own medium-format colour negatives by slicing, splicing, and conflating these ‘sediments’ of film into an imaginary, abstract representation of landscape by exposing photographic paper to this negative collage.
In our current era of generative image-making, however, picture-making has shifted from being a stratigraphic activity to becoming an extractive one. Images are now generated by pumping data into and out of a vast, inaccessible mass of photodata, much like the way we mine the earth’s natural resources. Since generated images are not composed of chronically layered sediment, do we still need more time here, like we do for light-based photos? I don’t think so. Indistinguishable, vanished times precede the genesis of the generated image – and with them, any notion of meantime disappears from the now. However, to fully digest the immense referential shift we are currently experiencing due to the growing presence of generated images in our visual habitat, we also need more time in that sense from a macro perspective.
The Times We Spend With Photos
Let me introduce another dimension of time that accompanies all photoworks – whether developed, calculated, or generated: the moments we share as beholders or viewers with photos or photoworks. These various moments collectively contribute to a photowork’s biography. Signs of use – fingerprints, scratches, folds, and the like – resulting from printing, storing, exhibiting, handling and gathering dust, direct our attention to the expanded temporality of each exhibited photowork, one that unfolds after the instant of its initiation. The gentle gestures of cutting and folding with which Ruth van Beek treats found photographic material from her ever-growing image archive both enhance and obscure the images’ original references. Her dialogue with these archival photographs becomes a physical interplay of time, encounter, and associations.
The exceptional scholar Tina Campt, known for her book Listening to Images (2017), once coined the term haptic temporalities to describe these various ‘times’ of the photograph. Drawing from her own archival encounters and scholarly engagement with historic photographs, she emphasizes that her interaction is only one moment in a much longer chain of engagements these images have had – and will continue to have. It is no different for us, the visitors of the exhibition I need more time. Although we are not meant to touch the photoworks physically, they can nevertheless touch us emotionally in reverse. Campt’s concept of haptic temporalities resonates through both physical and psychical forms of contact with family photographs, beside the visual contact of seeing. For this reason, I find it a powerful way to describe a photowork’s trajectory in the meantime:
[…] initiated at their moments of production through a desire to create a material object of sentiment to have and to hold. The multiple temporalities of these images continue through the diverse temporalities of their circulation, distribution, and the passing on of these objects to others.
The multiple emotions a photograph can evoke inevitably expand its temporal register. In this sense, a photograph can be appreciated as a meaningful object that accumulates many layers of use, affect, and memory across its lifespan – including our own encounters.
Sharing the same house on Burgazada, though during very different periods over the past hundred years, the personal temporalities of three women are brought together in the large-scale compositions of Rehan Miskci. The lives of the artist’s mother, Suzan Sönmez, the writer Suzan Sözen, and the first female Turkish sculptor, Iraida Barry – who each successively inhabited the same spaces – are amplified here through the layering of archival photographs, their gazes, and their own writings. This creates an intimate emotional continuity and a shared sense of presence between them, despite their initially separate lifetimes – one that reaches into the present moment, which we, as viewers, now share with them.
Photography: a Time-based Medium
In my previous research on the photographic surface, one of my central arguments is that, through the many stages and encounters a photowork passes through – from its initiation, via exposure and development, to its ongoing existence in the world – it is continually registering the passage of time. The famous ability of a photograph to show that has been – Roland Barthes’s well-known noeme of photography, the ça a été – has often been associated with the photographed moment in the past. But this has-been is also present as accumulated visual traces: the artist’s gestures, various image devices and carriers, or chemical interactions that manifest throughout a photowork’s lifespan.
Once again, the chemical photographic process illustrates this ongoing transformation most clearly. After the initial moment(s) of image creation, it is important to understand that the analogue chemical photograph remains in a process of becoming rather than settling into a fixed state of being – as its digital counterpart tends to do. The appearance of any given chemical photograph is likely to change over time. Its lifespan manifests itself both materially and visually. Consider the coloured photographs of yourself or your (grand)parents, the yellowed historical photographs passed down through generations, or the bleached colour photoworks from the 1960s onwards. There is, on the one hand, the short-term chemical reaction that occurs when light strikes the negative film or sensitized paper. On the other hand, there are long-term chemical processes shaped by the evolving material conditions of the photograph over time. It is precisely this processual characteristic that makes analogue photography, in essence, a time-based medium – even if it is not officially classified under the category of time-based art and media.
Seeking Deep Time in Photos
The long-term development of the photograph underlines the fact that it performs the image, rather than merely being what it depicts. A continual motion springs from this processual characteristic, and that motion lingers in the – for the present – static appearance of photographic objects. Their passing is barely perceivable, as any time we experience them, they appear fragmented, like snapshots of snapshots. To illustrate what I mean, I would like to invoke a description of the temporality of landscape by Tim Ingold, from The Perception of the Environment:
[…] what appears to us as the fixed forms of the landscape, passive and unchanging unless acted upon from outside, are themselves in motion, albeit on a scale immeasurably slower and more majestic than that on which our own activities are conducted. Imagine a film of the landscape, shot over years, centuries, even millennia.
The pace of a changing landscape may seem incomparable to the photograph’s temporal rhythm, yet it reveals the shortfall of human perception when attempting to track long-term transformations. If we were to speed up a film recording of a photowork’s full life cycle – from the moment of development to its distant future in exhibitions, archives, or storage spaces – passing through the transformative movements of appearing and fading, we would witness how dynamic the photowork truly is.
The only transition in a photograph that can be witnessed by our naked eye is the moment when the latent image begins to emerge in the developer bath in the darkroom or when we wave with a developing Polaroid in our hands. Rising slowly from the blank surface of the exposed support, this is the most visible gesture of the passage of time in a photograph. Drawing on the logic of photographs’ development as a form of photographic knowledge, Dionne Lee considers her darkroom practice a mode of research – one that explores both the geologic record and the technology of photography. Speaking of deep time in photography, Lee draws a kinship between the fossilized remnants of ancient plants and photographic processes. To her, fossils are nature’s own form of self-documentation, fixed in the original medium – rock – the deep time photographs outside any human scale.
Performing Time
The performative nature of a photowork is not only manifested on the majestic scale of its lifetime – stretching across centuries – or in the brief moment the image emerges in the developer, but also in the way it intervenes spatially within the physical exhibition space, as seen in many of Lebohang Kganye’s installations or even Szilvia Bolla’s sculptures. The photoworks that stand or lie within Arter’s space – more so than those displayed on walls – draw us in differently. As (photo)objects, they more prominently elicit new movements from us visitors, and are enacted within a performative context. In his writings on contemporary dance and social criticism, Flemish cultural sociologist Rudi Laermans has developed an expanded concept of choreography. Freed from its narrow association with dance and bodily movement, in his conception, artefacts also become performers. Performances, then, combine installations, human and non-human movements, and both material and immaterial elements. The shared foundation of these choreographies is always space. Laermans thus describes choreography in broad terms as “the space in which dance is written”.
Time appears to be entangled within the parameters of space. Any performative element shaping the photographic meantime is ‘written in space’. One artistic position stands out in this context: Ege Kanar exposes photochemical paper to online videos of musical performances, looping them on a screen. The performance is thus inscribed into the emulsion, which holds the transformed, exposed silver particles. The physical place of the light-sensitive photographic surface ‘records’ the passage of time during the performance – and with it, the expressions of the musician in motion.
Space & Time: Die Fuge
Looking for time in photographs automatically draws us into the many spaces they travel through, inhabit, or relate to. Barbara Hooper, a human geographer who explores photography’s relation to place and space, argues in her contribution to the edited volume Take Place: Photography and Place from Multiple Perspectives (2009) that matter, time, and space are always inextricably connected. What we habitually call time and space, she suggests, is rather “formed matter spaced/timed into being”. Photoworks should be understood in their transition through multiple stages and spaces – interacting and acting, and thereby also transforming as part of their nature, while accumulating layers of time. Hooper beautifully encapsulates this idea:
The photograph itself […] both gathers together and disperses the event photographed, the photographer, and all subsequent spectators into a single becoming. […] We are now unable to say, with certainty, where and when the photograph begins and ends, who and what acted, who and what were acted upon.
There is a concept and word I hold dear, with which I would like to conclude our exploration of the dimensions of time in photography and of the exhibited works curated by Oğuz Karakütük. It refers to both a spatial and a temporal phenomenon: die Fuge. This German word denotes both the compositional form of the fugue in classical music and the narrow gap in between two panels or tiles. The dual meaning of die Fuge – on one hand, a physical, intimate in-between space found in our homes, and on the other, a musical composition in which a short phrase (the subject) is introduced in one voice and then imitated by others in succession – informs my own curatorial approach to well-composed, complex group exhibitions. It is the curatorial vision that ‘joints’ the photoworks in space: die Fugen zwischen den Werken (translated as “the gaps between the artworks”), resulting in an interwoven texture shaped by the (musical) motif in different manifestations.
Considering the exhibition I need more time as a physical fugue we have been listening to all along, we have encountered the subject of time iterating through many different artistic voices from around the world, leaving us with a true Art of the Fugue in both time and space.