Maarten Vanvolsem

(°1974, Brussels, Belgium)

Looking for time in the image.

Do images, built in time by the movement of the film, give us an image of time?

This photography is trying to open up the view on photographic images, who are way too often seen as a depiction of something in front of the camera, captured and frozen in a split second. However, all images are the result of a technology that is different of the human eye. This technology should therefore be taken into consideration whenever we look at a photographic image.

These images get their meaning in the continuous changes along the horizontal basic line, changes due to the moving film and camera. What we see is an evolving time, a camera-time, which is variable, which causes sharpness and blur, and that holds the centre of the image. The depicted is of minor importance to the subject, the dynamic time, shown in the picture. The camera-time is readable in the changes, on the one site in space (objects altering in position), on the other site of space (stretching, compressing, mirroring,…). The obvious deviation of these images compared to the ‘eye’s-view’ allow a new analysis of the photographic image. This analysis might have a lot in common with music. As in music the melody is defined by the changes from one note to the next, the flux is more important than the discrete notes. Similar the photographic image can be read as a dynamic melody.