Capturing Time: Time and Time Again
Reflecting on when a photo is re-made
One of my most liked photographs this last year on Instagram was an image I made with an iPhone. Not that’s an important qualification but it caught me a bit in a surprise. It has also garnered more comments than usual.
It’s a photo that I made on a walking bridge in Catskill after the first snow of 2022. I had my camera ready on a tripod, setup to take an image very similar to one I did after the first snow in the winter of 2021. With the camera and my ND (natural density) filters in place all I had to do was put my gloves back on and wait for the freight train to pass on the bridge in front of me - I don’t know when they come, sometimes I wait 20 minutes and other time, hours. A photographer awaits, like a fisherman does.
A teenager walked by and was curious about my setup so I told him what I was doing, and what I was waiting for. This is the nice thing about having a camera on a tripod, I find that people are genuinely curious to hear about what I am doing and I am happy to engage in a conversation, especially if I am just waiting for the train… Moments after he left I remembered I had a postcard in my bag of a previous photograph I made in 2021 in the same spot. I dug the postcard out so I can show him an example but the young man was already too far away, and the bridge was too slippery for me to try and run after him.
With no train in sight I had time to play around with the postcard and the view in front of me. Taking my gloves off, I held the postcard out towards the bridge, matched the location of the train in the postcard to the bridge and took the photo below on my iPhone.
The idea for this image didn’t come out of nowhere. A photographer I am often inspired by is Kenneth Josephson. I saw a show of his work at the MCA Chicago some years back and loved the breath of the work, genuine sense of exploration and play throughout his varied career. The one image that I was most familiar with before seeing more of his work is shown below (it is on a cover of a book by Stephen Shore - The Nature of Photographs).
In this photo the artist is holding a photograph that he found taken by an anonymous photographer. A photo within a photo, of a subject (the ship) that could have been there - but is actually not. Josephson’s work often challenges our view of what is or can be shown in a photograph, what is real and what is made up or manipulated, and through that practice Josephson expand what we think of about photographs and the medium of photography. There are also layers of time in this work, as the artist is holding an undated but clearly older photograph over a timeless ocean and to top it all it looks like the artist himself is cruising on a ship.
This king of layering - of visuals and time passing - is what I had in mind when I pulled my postcard out and framed my shot.
From the 1983 Museum of Contemporary Art Kenneth Josephson exhibition catalog:
It is photographs of the strength and intellectual texture of these works that have had a substantial impact not only on contemporary photography, but on contemporary art as well, for these images gave license, so to speak, to explode the illusionistic myths of picture-making and to use photography as a tool in the creation of statements about art (conceptual art).
While on the bridge I made a couple of images, trying to align the actual bridge with the train in the postcard, here is a tighter shot:
In my work the element of time is often a key ingredient. I almost “catalog” time by titling a photograph with the time it took to capture the subject (3.2 seconds of a freight train, for example). Making motion appear as solid, or converting fleeting motion into a static yet abstract object. I deliberately like to keep the title dry and informative, and let the visual power of the long exposure be present as-is, with the title providing background information on how much time a certain train or ship got “exposed” to the camera’s sensor.
In the case of the postcard being photographed, and back to this being a popular social media post, I think the image in this case strikes a chord on several levels:
The postcard I am holding is my photo, and the image was made at the same spot as a year before.
The weather is the same, there is snow on the trees and on the bridge in both visual layers, thus a magical season is repeated.
The postcard is showing a train in movement, there is action in it that is not happening in the “actual” scene in front of the camera. The main event in the image - a train passing - has happened in the past but not in this specific scene, yet.
We are so used to looking and seeing images in digital form that there is a cerebral surprise to see one holding a print!
This kind of play with visuals and time was such a delight for me to make that I think it shows in the final image and effected people, perhaps more than I expected.
To me the wonderful thing about these trains is that they are never the same, so while the bridge or tracks remain constant, the cars’ color and shape change constantly, change that is multiplied sometimes by the different light conditions, as shown in the examples below. Here is the actual image that was printed on the postcard in 2021:
And here is my (newer) version from that day, made in 2022:
Note: I used a different lens for each photo, and chose to go wider with my latest image - I don’t mind cropping and wanted to get more trees on the sides, just in case I like it more as a wider frame. The image in 2021 was made on a Canon R5 with a Canon 24-105mm zoom lens, zoomed to around 50mm. The image in 2022 was made on the same camera with a Carl Zeiss 35mm PC (perspective correction) lens.
A bit of BTS, here is my setup on the bridge:
One final note, back to Kenneth Josephson’s work. I‘d like to mention another important element of his art and that is the subtle use of humor. The work is not necessarily funny (like a ha ha joke) but brings a smile to one’s face as it makes us ponder the reality we are witnessing - through the play on layers, time being witnessed or questioned and simply making an image that is not “normal” - whatever that means these days. I feel that humor is often lacking in the art world, and as I mature into the practice of image making the more and more I appreciate artists who poke fun at various ideas, while still taking themselves seriously. I hope to expand on such ideas in a future post.
Thanks for looking and reading! Happy 2023. Let me know what you think by adding a comment below.
That’s a good point. It was nice.
I enjoy seeing someone else carrying a tripod. Tripods help you think.