The (Everyday) Image as One of Many: What Happens in the Interstice?

This paper will consider how explorations of time and movement in a contemporary art context have capitalised on the gap as the territory where we can shape our access to images. The author’s engagement with place through everyday images has led to a series of art projects involving photography and video. The discussion will examine how these works capitalise the space in-between images to reflect on time. Reference will be made to David Claerbout’s work, in particular The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment, as it uses multiple photographic takes to endlessly prolong a moment. Mel Bochner regarded Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs as ‘serialization of time through the systematic subtraction of duration from event’. Within these ideas of the image and its relation to the lived moment as posited by Briony Fer, the discussion will allude to Bergsonian duration where ‘actual present’ and ‘virtual past’ coincide, with particular focus on Gilles Deleuze’s ideas of cinematic time. Within the temporal implications of the still image, Roland Barthes’s ‘photographic moment’ will be contrasted with Vilém Flusser’s ideas of the photographic image as a ‘possibility of visualisation’