Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

In this paper I use time as a pendulum between illusions and redolent depictions of our environment to seek and explore the idea of trace within the context of photographic practice as a phenomenology of perception. “In order to retain that which has come before me, I need to reach through a thin layer of time.” As Merleau-Ponty’s observation suggests, experiential perception allows us to explore sensorial visual-imaginations that lead us from one thought to another, and in effect from one photograph to another as a temporal yet sequential succession within time. My camera sits within a linear process of burning light that, as familiar as a photograph, bathes in and lays claim to time. Like a searchlight, this burning light confidently resolves itself so intimately upon a surface. My camera is a veritable time machine enacting “the transformation of matter and the movement of the mind as interrelated phenomena”- (Bruno). It speaks with the sun, exchanging a penetrative alchemic exuberance within a space of possibilities where exploration seems to roam freely. The subject is becoming surface. The latent image, a conversant pendulum that scribes a pervasive and lingering complexity between the adroit and the facile, reveals to us that illusions are a suggestive trace of the unfixed. Trace is not purely a response to an image or photograph, it is something that the photographer embeds within layers of time. It is something that we perceive as an illusion that acts as mediation between the image and time itself.