POP 3 (1) pp.

121139 Intellect Limited 2012

Philosophy of Photography Volume 3 Number 1

2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.3.1.121_1

Ben Burbridge University of Sussex

Art photography at the End of Temporality

Keywords
art photography temporality instantaneous photography Frederic Jameson formalism digitization

Abstract
This article examines a strain of contemporary art photography marked by its resemblance to earlier scientific motion studies as indicative of a wider scientific turn in recent photographic art. Focusing on Sarah Pickerings series Explosions (2008), Denis Darzacqs The Fall (2006), Ori Gershts Blow Up (2007) and Martin Klimas Flower Vases (2008), it addresses the conditions that have allowed for forms and methodologies associable with earlier scientific imagery to be reshaped as contemporary art, particularly the large-scale of recent museum photography and its self-conscious indeterminacy of meaning. Adopting a schematic approach based on the identification of similarity, I examine the implications of ambiguity and scale as inherent qualities of the work, along with the interpretations that the projects examined share. Noting a potential formalism in artists repeated isolation of frozen motion, I anchor this interest in the medium-specific qualities of photography in two changes associated with digitization. Where digital postproduction has placed pressure on traditional ontological understandings of the medium, the projects are shown to offer a nostalgic return to purer forms of photographic production. Drawing on Fredric Jamesons 2003 essay, The end of temporality, I conclude by considering how the photographs may be implicated in wider transformations to the construction and experience of time under late-capitalism.

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should certain phases of the movements be considered of sufficient naturally artistic value to permit their being copied without derogation to artistic effect, it is unnecessary to say it is not for that purpose they are published: their mission is simply to furnish a guide to the laws which control animal movements. (Muybridge 1899: 7) few periods have proved as incapable of framing immediate alternatives for themselves, let alone imagining those great utopias that have occasionally broken on the status quo like a sunburst. Yet a little thought suggests that it is scarcely fair to expect long-term projections or the deep breath of great collective projects from minds trained in the well-nigh synchronic habits of zero-sum calculation and of keeping an eye on profits. (Jameson 2003: 70405) The past twenty years have witnessed a scientific turn in art photography, with a string of projects marked by formal, conceptual and methodological resemblances to photographs deployed as aids to earlier science. Several writers have noted similarities between an objectifying strain in contemporary portraiture and the instrumental realism of nineteenth-century mug-shots and ethnographic photography (Stallabrass 2007; Ewing 2004: 615; Sobieszek 1999: 3279).1 Elsewhere, efforts to disarm the photographed subject through the application of external stimuli have been linked to the clinical studies of Charcot and Duchenne (Lowry 2007 3640; Burbridge 2010). The nineteenthcentury technologies of X-Ray, photo-telescopy and photo-microscopy have all featured in recent artworks, while a spate of books and exhibitions have addressed the appeal of earlier spirit photography for contemporary artists (Ferris 2003; Durant and Marshling 2005). The tendency is too great to examine in detail here. Rather, I address it through a particularly pronounced example, that uses short exposure times to visually arrest rapidly moving phenomena, suspending subjects as though in a permanent state of stasis. Prominent examples include Sarah Pickerings series Explosions (20042009), which shows pyrotechnic displays designed to simulate different explosive devices; Martin Klimass Flower Vases (2008), for which the artist photographed vases of flowers moments after a bullet had passed through them; Denis Darzacqs series The Fall (2006), in which the acrobatic performances of street dancers are photographed in such a way that they appear to be falling; and Ori Gershts Blow Up (2007), which depicts floral arrangements that resemble Fantin-Latour still lives, frozen in liquid nitrogen and obliterated into minute pieces by concealed explosives. I want to examine links between this work and the iconic images produced by Eadweard Muybridge, Harold Edgerton, A. M. Worthington, Albert Londe and Ottomar Anschutz as aids to the scientific study of motion. While such resemblances are widely acknowledged by the artists, and in the literature generated in response to their

1.

I use the term science broadly here, to encompass pseudoscientic practices such as physiognomy and psychical investigation.

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Art photography at the End of Temporality 2. Compare, for example, the numerous contextual details in Cartier-Bressons iconic Paris, Gare St Lazare, 1932 and the repetitive and non-descript settings encountered in Darzacqs series.

work, they have not been subject to any detailed analysis. Neither have the similarities between the various art projects been explored. The links I go on to outline raise a number of questions; for example: Why have earlier techniques of picture production appealed to artists? What happens to forms of photography associable with nineteenth-century science as a result of their reconfiguration as art? What forms of knowledge are produced by such images, and what types of subjectivity do they allow for? More broadly, what do these approaches suggest to be true about photographys current place in the art world? To answer these questions, it is necessary to address specific links between the uses of photography in recent art and earlier science, along with what makes them distinct. It is also necessary to look at the wider social, cultural and technological contexts from which the practices emerged, paying particular attention to two key changes associated with digitization: the post-production of photography in Photoshop, and the experience of time under late-capitalism.

Instrumental aesthetics
The use of short exposures to suspend moving bodies in time and space is not unique to the scientific analysis of motion. Such techniques have long occupied a wide span of photographic production, particularly within the art-orientated form of photojournalism described by Cartier-Bresson in terms of the decisive moment (Jussim 1989: 52). The specific parallels I am suggesting depend on five additional elements that, to a greater or lesser extent, are harnessed in combination in each of the projects under consideration here. Links can be drawn through the types of subject matter depicted. Darzacq shows human subjects moving at speed in a manner similar to Muybridges obsessive studies of human and animal locomotion (Muybridge 1887b). Gersht and Klimas document the impact of explosive devices, or of a moving object as it collides with a stationary one, suggesting parallels with Edgertons photographs of bullets passing through apples, light bulbs and playing cards, or Worthingtons studies of the splashes created by falling objects entering a liquid surface (Edgerton and Killian 1939; Worthington 1908). The subjects are photographed in such a way that emphasis is placed on the action itself, rather than the context in which it occurred, distancing the work from Cartier-Bressons decisive moment, where the documentary function of the picture usually demands its subject be shown within specific and identifiable environments. This is clearest in the work of Gersht and Klimas, which deploys plain backdrops in studio settings, but is also true though less so of Pickering and Darzacq, owing to the repetitive nature of the exterior environments shown, and the lack of distinctive features that would otherwise distract from the action depicted.2 The contemporary images are also marked by a formal consistency across the series, with subjects photographed from similar distances and positioned centrally within the frame. Here, the series recall the visual languages of earlier conceptual

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art. In an influential essay, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have linked similar methods of framing encountered in nineteenth-century scientific imagery to the constitution of mechanical objectivity during the period. This non-interventionist trope is said to be related to subjectivity as wax to seal, requiring that aspects of the personal be censured and the subjectivity of scientific and aesthetic judgement be overcome (Daston and Galison 1992: 82). The contemporary work instigates a related, if paradoxical, mode of subjectivity, through the decisions to replicate the pictorial characteristics of objectivity within a discursive space that is more often associated with aesthetic decisions and creative expression. The evacuation of subjectivity becomes a stylistic device. The actions shown are either choreographed by the artists for the camera as in the work of Klimas, Gersht and Darzacq or are photographed in such a way that th\ey appear to have been so, given the absence of any clear indication of the practical reasons for their occurrence. Pickering focuses on the explosions taking place in nondescript landscapes, rather than the clients, salesmen and demonstration teams that would provide her images with an overtly documentary function. This has led Karen Irvine to describe Pickering as fascinated by the potential of the camera to at once record the real and abstract it (Irvine 2010: 7). These explosions are, furthermore, staged for the express purpose of being viewed by potential clients. In consequence, the photographs share an air of experimental staging, linking them to what Elizabeth Edwards has described as a growing trend in nineteenth-century laboratory practice to replicate the actualities of the physical, empirically experienced world in controlled conditions that allowed for their analysis (Edwards 1997: 58). Finally, some of the technologies and methodologies deployed by artists hark back to the nineteenth and early twentieth-century pursuit of instantaneous images. The photography historians Phillip Prodger and Martha Braun have each examined how the desire to analytically study motion had fuelled the creation of faster shutters, increasingly sensitive chemicals and the use of flash photography, reducing exposure times to the merest fraction of a second (Braun 1997: 1586; Prodger 2003: 24112). While Darzacq and Pickering simply deploy the fastest available exposure times on their cameras, Klimas and Gersht synchronize flashes with the rapid motion of their subject using sound triggers and electrical devices, in a manner that directly recalls the earlier procedures of Edgerton. In Gershts series, in which a bank of cameras is used to produce a series of photographs in quick succession, the links with Muybridges work are clearer still.3 Such similarities are accompanied by significant differences, relating to the production, presentation and display of the photographs. Whereas the majority of earlier scientific images were encountered as small-scale, black and white prints and reproductions in books, case studies and journals, art photography now usually assumes the form of large-scale colour prints, displayed in frames or behind Perspex on the walls of galleries and modern art museums.4 This provides the photographs with an immersive element, taken by some critics as symptomatic of a more general spectacularization of contemporary art.5 The effect exploited by photographers is described by Julian Stallabrass in

3.

A colleague described a visit to Gershts studio as akin to entering a scientic laboratory. All the artists have exhibited photographs at well over a metre in height. A number of papers on this theme were given at 2007 conference, Rethinking Spectacle at Tate Modern.

4.

5.

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terms of the data sublime: the experience of a chaotically complex and immensely large configuration of data acting much as renditions of mountain scenes and stormy seas did on the nineteenthcentury viewer (Stallabrass 2007: 8283). Whereas the practical usefulness of photography to early science relied in part on the diminishing of scale to obscure inessential constituents, recent artists push photography in the opposite direction: providing an excess of information and asserting the physical presence of the photograph as object (Lynch 1985: 37; Bryson 1996: 52). Earlier motion studies aimed to regulate the engagement of viewers through the ways in which subjects were represented, the relationship of photographs to one another, and the additional information provided. This included extended captions, charts, diagrams, written explanations and drawn illustrations. Bruno Latour has described such combinations in terms of information trans-formation: the ways mediators align one another and choose what will remain constant through transformations and what may be discarded (Latour 1998: 424). Muybridge famously deployed a battery of cameras to produce series of photographs in rapid succession, showing the different phases of motion as though a set of stationary poses. These were reproduced together in grids, demanding the viewer read phases of movement from left to right and top to bottom, much like a written text (Snyder 1997: 396). Similar methods of production and presentation are encountered in photographs by Worthington, Londe, Anschutz and Kolrausch. Where an analysis of movement demanded an indication of temporal and spatial change, Edgertons use of photography to document the impact of a fast-moving projectile upon a stationary object or surface could be achieved through a single picture. Such concerns are evident in the timing of the photographs, showing the precise moment of impact, or the moment immediately afterwards. In either case, both the projectile and its target appear, representing cause and effect within a single image. Captions for the earlier photographs usually described both the specific subject and motion depicted Athletes Boxing, Bullet Passing Through Candle Flame, and so on while written information clarified the distances represented in the photographs and the length of each exposure time. This translated the empirical data of the image into a series of numerical quantities (Jeffrey 2010: 5257). While Martin Klimas subject closely resembles that of Edgerton showing the effects of a 9mm steel bulletshot through the base of the vase (Klimas 8 May 2010 interview) the photographs are timed in such a way that only the vase is depicted, leaving the precise cause of its obliteration unexplained. Pickering and Gersht show the effects of explosives, further obscuring a visual indication of cause. The majority of these artists produce a single image for each of the actions depicted, which are brought together in series to create a typology of different, related effects. The viewer is encouraged to compare the visual forms of the frozen movements or explosions, much like a series of sculptures. Only Gersht produced sets of images of a single action in rapid succession in the manner of Muybridge, but significantly these are not displayed in ways that correspond spatially to the chronology of their production.

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Captions for the recent artworks usually adopt generic series titles, with individual photographs numbered as derivatives. These descriptions generally relate either to the action or the subject, rather than the relationship between the two. There is no effort to further explain what is shown, or translate this into alternative, numerical systems of representation. While debate may continue regarding the particular artistic credentials of a photographer such as Muybridge (Braun 1992: 22862; Brookman 2010), it is not my aim to state unequivocally whether the earlier photographs belong to art or science. Rather I hope it is demonstrated that, unsurprisingly, all aspects of the pictures initial production and contextualization allowed them to function in a considerably more scientific fashion than the examples of art photography which, in other ways, resemble them.

Interpretive traps
This under-determination of meaning opens the contemporary projects to multiple interpretations. Gershts pictures of exploding flowers bear a clear resemblance to earlier photographs produced by Muybridge and Edgerton, which suggests a very different response to that of an Israeli military Chief of Staff, for whom they carried associations with suicide bombers (Gersht 4 June 2010 interview). Elsewhere, the project has been seen as a contemporary take on the still life tradition, and a symbolic meditation on the dialectic of destruction and creation in western civilization (Wright 2007; Wainwright 2007: 41). It is potentially all or none of these things. The majority of interpretations prompted by the recent projects similarly swing between the specific and the symbolic: Pickerings work serves as a document of the artificial explosives and their demonstration, and a comment on the place of the simulacrum in western culture (Irvine 2006: 69; Gavin 2007: 196); Darzacqs series has been praised as a collaboration with young street dancers, an allusion to 9/11, and a metaphor for Paris fallen inner city youths following the riots in the city in 2005 (Chrisafis 2007; Jauffret 2006: 24). In every case, the excavation of such meanings relies upon information other than that provided in the photographs or their captions. The way in which meaning depends in significant ways on the knowledge and experiences of a particular viewer, is underlined by the artists in interview, who posit a potential to generate a variety of interpretations as essential to the vitality of their work. Gersht would like peoples first encounter with the work to be purely visual . the past, present and future for these images is applied by whoever looks at them (Gersht 4 June 2010 interview). Pickering has suggested that it is really important not to close all the doors, not to make something so watertight in terms of what the strategy is that theres no room for creative interpretation by the viewer (Pickering 22 June 2010 interview). Darzacq is keen to foreground the fact that you can read into these photos whatever you want (quoted Chrisafis 2007). The uncertainty of meaning can be seen to answer a basic structural need: marking the photographs as art through a seeming opposition to the distinct and specific

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functions prescribed for photography elsewhere in culture (Bourdieu 1965). This adds a further dimension to the pictures resemblance to scientific imagery. By coupling painstaking and often highly specialized modes of production with an uncertainty regarding function and meaning, artists create an aestheticized parody of instrumentalism, intense in its labour and, consequently, one way to demonstrate their own artistic freedom. Such freedom appears to extend to the viewer, who can exercise subjectivity in ways prohibited by the production and contextualization of the earlier motion studies. The assumption underscoring this supposed enfranchisement can be reversed, however, if we note that it positions ignorance as enabling, and information as incarcerating. In this case, viewers are placed in a weaker position to judge the photographs than those associated with science, since the decision is made not to explain what it is they represent. For Stallabrass, the potential for multiple readings, indeterminacy and a revulsion at essentialism feeds an industry based on the interpretation of artworks. Academics and writers produce a steady and ongoing stream of responses, as further meanings are excavated, contested, dispensed with and revived (Stallabrass 2010: 27). My schematic approach marks an effort to work against the postmodern mysticism promoted by the work, along with the monographic focus on artists practices that continue to shape the majority of work in this field. Grouping examples of art photography together based on elements they share, it is possible to note the fact that indeterminacy constitutes an inherent quality of the work. It is also possible to consider the common intentions and interpretations that unite the projects. Pickering has described how she became fascinated by the suspended moment in time (quoted in Jaeger 2008: 20); Klimas has discussed the cameras ability to discover an unknown part of the world (Klimas 8 May 2010 interview); and Gersht has described his interest in how, through the technological devices of photography, the limits of what we can see and experience of the world are expanded how photography can alleviate this moment from the rest (Gersht 4 June 2010 interview). Such sentiments are echoed in a number of published responses, which note an interest in what Brian Dillon described as the nature of the photographic instant as a central component of the projects (Dillon 2007: 11; Barrett-Lennard 2008; Dvkstra 2007: 25; Harder 2008). Particularly when viewed in the light of such comments, the resemblance of the work to earlier motion studies can be understood in relation to the specific capacities they demonstrate to be true of photography as a medium. Through the formal consistency of the images and the absence of actions and contexts that would otherwise distract from the frozen motion depicted, the photographs underline what John Szarkowski once described as the isolation of a single moment, in which photographers have found an inexhaustible subject (Szarkowski 1966: 100). At the core of these practices sits the repeated and insistent presentation of the cameras capacity to suspend motion as stasis, frozen moments shown as constellations of striking visual effects.

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Mechanical clichs
In order to resist the usual effects of such formalism, it is necessary to anchor an interest in the medium-specific qualities of photography in factors existing outside the image. Two aspects, particularly, make up the ontological pairing at the heart of the formalist tendency that concerns us here: photography and time. Each has been unsettled, reconfigured or transformed as a result of an increasingly digital culture. Several texts written in response to the recent work have noted the absence of digital manipulation in achieving its pictorial effects. Where one writer described the light-hearted magic of Pickerings tricksters prestidigitalisation (Gopnik 2006), Darzacqs work has been said to explore the idea of the body in levitation, using straight photography and no Photoshop tricks (BarrettLennard 2008). The artist has attributed this point to the fact they probably like that what looks as if it is impossible is real (Darzacq 27 May 2010 interview). Gersht has explained that it is really important for me how light interacts with the technology, how this creates this optical effect (Gersht 4 June 2010 interview). Continuing in this vein, Martin Klimas has suggested his work should be viewed as real photographic images because there is no manipulation (quoted Baldwin 2007), going on to describe the use of digital post-production as a symbiosis between painting and photography that represents its own genre to be seen with other rules (Klimas 8 May 2010 interview). Scholarly discussion around digital photography has, until fairly recently, centred on the impact of digital post-production upon the relationship of photography and the real (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008: 10). While early accounts proved keen to assert the radical changes that such technologies entailed (Wombell 1991; Haworth-Booth 1994), they were countered by more tempered analyses, focused on potential continuities between the use of computer software and older forms of photographic manipulation and retouching (Rosler 2004; Sorensen 2006). The digital post-production of images was also shown to have specific ramifications for photographys relationship to time. For Geoffrey Batchen, photography had been distinct from other media due to its depiction of objects in fixed relations at a given moment in real time (Batchen 1997: 9094). The type of digital temporality described by Fred Ritchin in his 2009 book, After Photography, is therefore closer to that attributed by Batchen to drawing or painting, with subsequent sets of interventions in the image introducing a new and uncertain duration to the creation of photographs (Ritchin 2009: 2829). Although debates about digitization may, in recent years, have moved away from the real, and onto issues surrounding the networked image (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008: 925), the frequent references to the manipulation of the image in Photoshop by artists and writers associated with the scientific turn indicates the extent to which concerns regarding the veracity of photography after digitization shaped art practices during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Artists embrace of photographically frozen motion suggests the effects of such changes in two ways. In a general sense, the pictures provide a pronounced demonstration of photographys unique

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Art photography at the End of Temporality 6. Recent exhibitions of this work include Shadow Catchers (V&A, London, 2010) and The New Alchemists (London Art Fair, 2012).

relation to the real, for here is a whole world of previously unseen rapid motion that only the short exposure times of photography can reveal (Killian 1939: 7). More specifically, the repeated deployment of very short exposures across series marked by their strict formal and aesthetic consistency underlines photographys distinct temporal character, proposing an ontological understanding modelled according to the cameras mechanical origins. Viewed in relation to the manipulated digital image, the work is driven by a reactionary impulse, reasserting the extraordinary effects that can be achieved through purely mechanical means. The representation of these forms as art world novelties at a time when they are well-worn clichs, suggests both nostalgia for modernist wonder, and a turning away from the new possibilities provided by computers. Consequently, the work can be linked to a wider set of practices, concerned with the materiality of the photograph as object and antiquated printing processes, which have found favour with collectors, galleries and museums in recent years.6 The discussion of the work by artists and writers indicates the extent to which the effects of digitization cannot be so straightforwardly set aside. Extra-photographic reassurances that the pictures were created without Photoshop hint at a shift in the collective understanding of photography and the degree of manipulation to which all photographs are now potentially prone (Ritchin 2009: 2450). The insecurity apparent in the artists statements indicates the effects of such a change, through the implicit suggestion that, when presented with photographs depicting phenomena usually invisible to the naked eye, viewers may assume this to be the creation of the computer, not the camera. This marks a further contrast to the earlier scientific imagery, linking the functions the work first served to wider contexts. Where earlier motion studies relied on the perceived objectivity of the camera to verify the truthfulness of their revelations and to show what the eye could not see, the contemporary viewer is assumed to be more hesitant about accepting any similar claim (Snyder 1997: 37985; Nickel 2000: 38). If the work invokes an older understanding of photographic possibility, unaffected by digital post-production, the suspicion of digital forms of manipulation must first be assuaged.

The end of temporality?

While changes to photographic technologies may go some way to explaining the projects mediumspecific concerns, any such effort to position photography albeit photographic technology as a totalizing interpretive horizon still risks the slide into formalism. To advance the analysis further, it is necessary to look outside photography altogether, somewhere nonetheless that represents more collective forms of experience than that of an individual viewer. The most obvious possibility lies in what Batchen described as the pervasive suspicion that we are entering a time when it will no longer be possible to tell the original from its simulation (Batchen 1997: 303). In which case, a stress

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on photographys indexical dimension could be taken as representative of a Baudrillardian anxiety. Rather than contribute my voice to the existing postmodern chatter concerning the simulacrum, I take my lead again from the earlier motion studies, and address recent art photography in relation to the constitution and experience of time. In a 2004 book, sociologist Barbara Adam described changes from an embodied, experiential understanding of time as growth and ageing, seasonal variation, to the machine time that accompanied industrialization. This shifted the experience and meaning of time towards invariability, quantity and precise motion expressed by numbers (Adam 2004: 11314). As a quantity, time became both an essential parameter in scientific investigation, and an economic resource that could be allocated, spent or saved: an abstract value that could be exchanged for other abstract values such as money (Adam 2004: 115). The shift towards a mechanized understanding of time was embodied by the increased presence of clocks in the nineteenth century and, particularly, the standardization of temporality through a series of measures that stretch from the introduction of Greenwich Mean Time in Britain in 1880 to the first global transmission of a time signal from on top of the Eiffel Tower on 1 July 1913 (Solnit 2003: 2324; Adam 2004: 11417). For Scott Lash and John Urry, the mastery of nature through which all sorts of phenomena, practices and places became subjected to the dizembedding, centralising and universalising march of time represented a central component of industrialized modernity (Lash and Urry 1994: 229). For E. P. Thompson, clock time was critical to the constitution of industrial capitalism (Thompson 1967: 5797). Photography emerged from the same industrial context, and the dissection of time by the photographic image provided visual form to the wider efforts to divide temporality into increasingly standardized units (Haworth-Booth 1994: 4). This is particularly clear in the uses made of photography by the likes of Muybridge and Marey, as they broke motion down into its constituent phases, and subjected it to precise forms of measurement and analysis (Creswell 2006: 35). As Rebecca Solnit has suggested, the photographs shifted understandings from the mysteries of nature to the manageable mechanics of industrialism (Solnit 2003: 183). Central to this industrial logic was a definition of time in terms of quantification and succession, cause and effect, as the components of movement were studied in relation to one another. This suggests links with enlightenment narratives of human progress, which saw the predetermined sequence of history as following the lead of reason and the impulse of productive forces (Castells 1996: 447). For Martha Braun, the photographs provided the means through which laws governing the physical world were understood, harnessing and transforming energy and so leading to the progress of society (Braun 1992: 374). We can also think about the ways in which the dissection of physical activity into constituent phases in pursuit of greater efficiency heralds the coming of early twentieth-century Fordism and the rhythm of the production line.

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In our post-industrial, late-capitalist era, the experience of time is said to have changed again, as postmodern theories trade in notions of tele-presence (Virilio 1997: 4), timeless time (Castells 1996: 479), or the end of temporality (Jameson 2003). For Fredric Jameson, writing in 2003, postmodernity is marked by an evacuation of narrative, itself a symptom of the collapse of alternative models to the capitalist system, and the concepts of historical progress they encouraged (Jameson 2003: 69599; Anderson 1992: 279375). Lacking such narratives, society is said to have been enveloped by an uncritical present. This existential shift is linked both to socio-economic changes, and the technologies that have shaped, and been shaped, by them. Where post-industrial forms of work have replaced industrial labour, a convulsive shift in our mapping of reality is said to have occurred that tends to deprive people of their sense of producing that reality, to confront them with the fact of pre-existing circuits without agency, to condemn them to a world of sheer passive reception. (Jameson 2003: 702) The dematerialization of capital and the expansion of the financial market have similarly replaced older capitalist cycles with the hourly fluctuations of the global stock-market and an anxious daily consultation of the listings. In an era of modern communication technologies, the mobile phone has replaced the diary, and rolling television news feeds of current events reported in real-time have been substituted for more detailed and reflective forms of journalism. As a result of such changes, some new non-chronological and non-temporal patterns of immediacies have come into being. This has reduced the experience of time to a perpetual present. Its incoherence is a function of the loss of any collective past or future to which it can be opposed (Jameson 2003: 70407). Efforts to describe the experience of temporality in terms of totalizing shifts must be treated with caution, as a result of their tendency to exaggerate the pervasiveness of new technology and downplay the persistence of older forms of temporality (Jameson warns against any such lapse into historicism). A measured analysis is more likely to describe the experience of time in terms of the complex processes of layering outlined by Eviatar Zerubavel in her book Time Maps: seasonal change and the rising of the sun coexisting with the ticking hands of the clock, the real-time produced by information technologies and aspects of the media, alongside a range of further temporal models shaped by various social and cultural factors (Zerubavel 2003). The value of postmodern analyses lies, rather, in the general acceleration of culture they describe in relation to specific technological changes, and the effort to link this to a synthetic account of a shifting capitalist system. This proves particularly useful here as a framework within which to address art photography as a symptom of wider cultural transformations.

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On the face of it, the examples of art photography discussed position themselves in opposition to the experience of temporality described by Jameson in two important ways. First, they invoke an older, mechanical model of time through formal and methodological resemblances to earlier motion studies. In these terms, the work involves the type of nostalgic quality discussed above, opening a discreet space for photography as art through efforts to resist or provide counterpoints to contemporaneous cultural changes. Second, we can think about the ways in which contemporary art is encountered in a physical sense. The presentation of static, framed, large-format photographs on the white expanses of gallery or museum walls arguably encourages a slower and more contemplative form of encounter to that set in place by the rapid proliferation of images in the neo-liberal mediasphere. In this way, recent practices pursue the standard endorsement of video art as a mode of resistance to a generally accelerated culture (Pere 1988: 2128). Yet this familiar and apparently straightforward line of argument is limited by its failure to account for the manner in which the forms of understanding promoted by such work impact on the experience and construction of time. It is through the reconfiguration of mechanical instantaneity as contemporary art world spectacle that Jamesons model finds its purchase. In a 2006 article, Mary-Anne Doane set out to query Jamesons efforts to identify cultural symptoms of postmodern temporality in the popular action film: a genre he describes as violence pornography due to the evacuation of plot or narrative content in favour a succession of explosive and self-sufficient moments of violence (Doane 2006: 2338; Jameson 2003: 714). By focusing on cinema a medium defined by its inscription of movement Jameson is said to neglect the more pertinent demonstration of a perpetual and violent present in the instantaneous photographs of Muybridge and Marey. So the abruptness and agressivity of the snapshot is linked to the succession of explosive and self-sufficient moments of violence described by Jameson: the problem, approached by way of instantaneous photography, becoming how to theorize the instant (Doane 2006: 38). The dates of the motion studies destabilize an understanding of such qualities as a distinctive characteristic of time as experienced under late-capitalism. If we find evidence of the end of temporality in the nineteenth-century snapshot, how can we claim it as the exclusive property of postmodernism? (Doane 2006: 2838). The principal shortcoming of Doanes manoeuvre lies in an exclusive concentration on the ontological character of individual images, when early motion studies also deployed instantaneity as a tool: what Thomas Kuhn described in terms of a means rather than an end (Kuhn 1977: 34142). Leland Stanford commissioned Muybridge not only to create an instantaneous photograph, but to reveal the gait of the horse at a gallop and thereby correct previous assumptions regarding equine locomotion (Muybridge 1881). Mareys representations were from the outset driven by efforts to develop understandings about energy transferral (Braun 1992: 515). Edgerton was first of all a scientist and an electrical engineer (Kirlian 1937: 21). These practices were concerned with instantaneity,

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certainly, but rarely as an exclusive or autonomous goal. For a recent writer such as Solnit, early motion studies constituted the bare essence of a narrative (Solnit 2003: 193), a point indicative of a concern with causation, succession and explanation, rather than the total evacuation of narrative outlined by Jameson. Doanes reading of Muybridge relies on a process of de-contextualization that replicates the formalist fate of many scientific photographs. It neglects the instrumental functions of the pictures in favour of an ontological characterization of individual images: an account of what photography does or is, rather than how specific photographs have been used. Reflecting on a similar tendency, Ian Jeffrey described how Muybridges insight was that photography by itself adduced an idea of raw material... completed and complemented by all those directors notations. Without the crucial time-interval with its associated scripts and digits the originating scene would be, in effect, homeless. It is to this unsupported state that a lot of recent photography (Lise Safarti, Rinke Dijkstra) has returned. (Jeffrey 2010: 57) The parallel drawn here, between the formalist de-contextualization of instrumental forms of imagery and the indeterminacy of meaning favoured by contemporary art photographers, is particularly telling with regard to the projects I have addressed, which have wilfully stripped instantaneity of its explanatory contexts and so, too, of an overt narrative function. It is here that the full implications of the prioritization of effect over cause and the obscurantism of recent art photography can be recognized. In the most fundamental sense, the work presents the viewer with a constellation of violent instances without an indication of reason or cause, sets of images denied chronology at the level of production as well as display. They suspend their violent subjects in a perpetual present, enlarged to spectacular proportions. Concealed beneath a veil of high-minded interpretation exists a fireworks display, which couples pyrotechnic showmanship and the well-rehearsed effects resulting from photographic instantaneity. Rather than open the world to new ways of seeing, does this work repackage violence pornography in the slick, large-scale colour clothing of contemporary art photography; pitching the plotless action genre at the higher end of a cultural marketplace? Or, if not a direct equivalent, do they speak of a similar cultural condition? While one writer has described Gershts work as an unforgettable and painterly image of the apocalypse (Wright 2007), another admires the sheer spectacle and wizardry of his accomplishment (Dambrot 2008: 138). Viewed in the light of Jamesons analysis, it is possible that these projects serve a final, critical function, by reflecting neo-liberal culture on itself, as in a black mirror. This may be so, but how can one definitively discern the symptom and its imitation, when both adopt such spectacular form? The production of the artists series punctuates the period immediately

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preceding the global financial crash in 2008. Now that neo-liberalism falters, but no clear alternatives appear, it may be apposite to question whether artists will assist in the formulation of bright futures, or else continue to make beautiful fetishes of an incapacity to move beyond the present.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sara Knelman, Julian Stallabrass and Kathryn DelBoccio, who offered comments on a draft of this article from which I have benefitted greatly. I have presented parts of the article as papers at the University of Sussex and to Ph: The Photography Research Network, where further useful feedback was provided.

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Suggested citation
Burbridge, B. (2012), Art photography at the End of Temporality, Philosophy of Photography 3:1, pp. 121139, doi:10.1386/pop.3.1.121_1

Contributor details
Ben Burbridge is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex, where he teaches the history and theory of photography and post-war American and European Art . His research focuses on relationships between photographys artistic and instrumental applications, and how the medium is

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implicated in wider social, cultural and political transformations. He is the co-curator of the 2012 Brighton Photo Biennial and a forthcoming exhibition examining the legacies of early scientific photography, opening at the Science Museum in Spring 2013. Burbridge is co-editor of Photoworks magazine and the co-founder of Ph, a collective of thirty early-career UK academics working with photography (see www.EitherAnd.org). Ben Burbridge has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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Figure 1: Rendering, Highbury Stadium development, London, 2005.

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