Before Focus is Fixed

The purpose of this MFA study is to develop a contemporary understanding of and visual response to the photographic in relation to the moment, pause and delay. The study takes the knowledge expressed in historical and contemporary readings of photographic and cinematic time and seeks to readdress this knowledge in relation to a modern technological framework. My visual practice centres on a “point of convergence” between separate modes of creating and theoretically indexing the photographic moment. This revaluation of ‘the moment’ and the slippage between historical distinctions between cinematic and photographic time is manifested in the subject, object and content of the work produced.

A central concern of my visual investigation is with the contemporary blurring of the distinction between the photographic object’s inherent stillness, and the constant narrative sequence of cinema. New technologies such as the internet, DVD, home cinema, digital video and photography are staring to collapse the distinction between photographic stasis and cinematic fluidity. The ability for a person to pause, rewind, re-watch, stop and manipulate the narrative sequence of a film has disturbed the flow of narrative; an expectation of narrative and conclusion has now given way to a pause or delay, a glitch in the flow of cinematic time(1).

This delay has effectively exposed the separate still images in cinema and disturbed the continuity of narrative, resulting in a state, where, as Mulvey writes, a ‘film’s original moment of registration can suddenly burst through its narrative time … the now-ness of story time gives way to the then-ness of the time when the movie was made, and its images take on social, cultural or historical significance, reaching out into its surrounding world’(2). This now and then dichotomy is also explored by Barthes when describing the function of the punctum(3) in reading a photograph.

Effectively as cinema is slowed and paused, the resultant stills take on a photographic reading, and combined with their cinematic origins produce a new sense of time, where expectation is both muted and delayed, and a new relationship containing the real and unreal, still and moving and then and now is created. The narrative is now controlled by the viewer, who can slow time at will. The viewer divests new readings into the resultant still images, paused in an effective slumber, repetitive short moments on repeat, fixed upon, re-watched and re-contextualised. The cinematic still provides the viewer with the opportunity to categorise, memorise and reorder cinematic images far from the specific temporal confines of time past/future. The effect is very immediate.

My work, though use of still photography, narrative film sequence and time capture stills, seeks to examine this pause or break or ‘irrational interval’ before focus is fixed. Historical modes of reading the photograph will be taken into consideration and reinterpreted in relation to contemporary filmic and photographic modes of production and consumption. My research attempts to make sense of this delay and examine the power the delay has on the way images are produced. I will discuss how our contemporary relationship to the image is changing the way we interact with ideas of the moment and representation. My research aims to discover if the disruption is limiting or liberating, and, that by way of delay, if cinema becomes reliant on the photographic index as narrative shifts between movement and pause. What lonely spectres emerge from the repetitive pause? How do we read “movement and flow” when we have the power to delay the eventual ending? What does the photographic image(4) mean to us now when we have the power to delay time? Does this change our expectation of the moment contained in an image? What is revealed?

In this vision conscious contemporary world, there is a deep impulse to seek meaning and truth (recognition) from a photographic (still) image. The artists I will discuss in relation to my own practice explore issues of time, delay, blur, mnemonic register and repetition in the image, through process, object and output. They cover a historical and contemporary field of “vision” and seek to impart a sense of how spectatorship of the (still) image is informed by both photographic histories and ideas of the cinematic narrative (slowed). Particular attention will be paid to Douglas Gordon, Hioroshi Sugimoto, Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky with theoretical reinterpretation of the works of Laura Mulvey, Roland Barthes, Paul Virilio and Jonathan Crary.

I aim to produce a lyrical essay reflecting on my own practice, and questions that arise from my own image creation. The function of the essay will be to strengthen my question asking capacity and situate my work in the now. A basic proposed structure is below, but of course is driven by the evolution of the artwork.

1. Maria Walsh, in ‘Against Fetishism: The Moving Quiescence of Life 24 Frames a Second’ refers to a Cinema of Moments, which seems to accurately describe the condition of the cinematic flow made still, the delay and rupture of filmic sequence. Further it could be said that a stilled image could now be read as belonging to the cinema of moments, wether captured from movement out of a cinematic sequence, or wether a standalone photographic image not related to an original narrative structure.
2. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image pg 30-31.
3. In my research Barthes’ Punctum refers not to the ‘detail’ of the image that draws you in, but of time, the duration of the image, the “that has been” - a call back to the true moment of representation.
4. Terms of distinction between the photographic and film still are still hazy, though I expect a more concrete term will emerge though research and practice. Perhaps just ‘the still’ will suffice prefixed as appropriate with cinematic or photographic. Combined they are as previously mentioned the Cinema of Moments.



Before Focus is Fixed - Chapter Outlines

The Bruise of Time
A re-reading of photographic and cinematic time – what is a “still”, what is contained in an image, what is the image’s duration? How do we read still images now – in light of new technologies and impulsive image viewing practices?

Coming Up for Air
Repetition and delay in contemporary visual practice.
If the distraction and flow is taken from cinema in the form of a delay, a pause, how does this affect our reflection, and, is the reflection and pensive and sometimes obsessive action of viewing the pause, consuming the delay – different from the photographic still? And if the delayed moment constant, repeated, duration is put on hold, then what does that moment become – is it contained, or does it break free from its stream of messaging?

I have nothing left to give; but you always want more
New modes of spectatorship.
What is discovered by the pause? How does this change the way we read a photographic still? Is the still now imbued with the power of the cinematic contained?

The Bloom of Recognition
Towards new interpretation on indexation and mnemonics in the cinema of stills.

But what does it mean for me now?
Afterthoughts of an image.

a visual reminder