Eye on Time
The Timescape Project. Provisional Notes
Note: Besides the German version, there is also a French translation of this essay available.
En route to the last day The picture of the Hydra is a picture of time. For it always grows again, it is immortal, forever present, eternal as time. Each photograph is an attempt to stop the Hydra growing. Attempts to stop time, to fix it forever, to speed it up and finish it off, somehow to grasp it – revealing nothing but our impotence, showing only that it grows again, unwavering. This frustrates us; at the same time, it is the foundation of all our hopes.
Killing time Time cannot be ignored or »killed«. Killing time (a typically masculine pleasure) is an empty phrase with a dark underlying meaning. »Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them«, says Dion Boucicault sarcastically. Osbert Sitwell, who ought to know, adds: »In reality, killing time is only the name for another of the multifarious ways by which time kills us. Time does not pass. What passes is us, and what we make, and what makes us. Whether time is long or short not only makes no difference, it is identical. Pascal mocked time, which is as it is and cannot be changed. He wrote about the way he divided up his time: »Je n’ai fait que celle-ci plus longue parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte …« (»This letter is rather long because I didn’t have the time to be brief.«)
Time is the substance of the Timescape Project. Time is its element; it has no other theme. Time is an invisible power which drags all of us along with it, like a scourge which we can never grasp. Timescape will reach its end when the scourge of time is over, at the latest on the Last Day. The project remains unfinished and in flux, both old and young – »fitter for new projects than for settled business«, as Bacon said of young people.
Archetypes of cinematic art Timescape: extremely short films about infinitely long times. In these fastest of all films – flashing past in contrast to the painstaking process of their development – time is the leading lady. The other actors are just objects, extras and scenery, continually replaced, interchangeable, only seemingly indispensible. Rooms, structures, objects in decay and forming again: all of them masks which time puts on.
Who, apart from us humans, takes any notice of time? Who, apart from us, claims not to have time, because he has not taken the time? Who takes his life instead? Who needs a bit more time, who takes time, who fills it and kills it, who thinks they are timeless, or up-to-date, who competes with his contemporaries and babbles on about »his day«? Who talks about »innopportune moments« and »early«, about »time’s countenance« and »saving time«? Who reads novels set in another time, or The Times, sings »time marches on« triumphantly, while marching back? We do, the users, the victims.
No time We can be ahead of time, we can even foresee it. We are nevertheless left standing; time is always ahead of us. We chase after time, persevering and insistent. Yet it is really time which is chasing us; it runs away, ahead and alongside. Like the hedgehog who outwits the hare in the fairytale, it is always there ahead of us.
We don’t have any time because we are obsessed with it. We always want a bit more time, to do a bit more with it – as if it were one of our raw materials. The opposite applies: we are the raw material. That is, we can save time but it doesn’t mean we therefore have more. We can waste it, but it doesn’t mean there will be less of it. We can have a lot of time or a little: to time this is completely irrelevant. We can do everything with it … but in the end it does with us what it will. In the end, time dismisses us.
Proust The train of time travels in only one direction. Only the fantasy express travels the other way. The journey takes a long time, longer than a human life. Some people will not agree that time is lost. They start searching for all the time they think they have lost. All Proust was looking for was the desire to feel longing – the point at which death and birth, desire and pain all coincide. He called this point Combray, others have called it Nirvana or Walhalla. In Bavarian – which is a separate, old language, not just a German dialect – there is a nice word for this search: »Zeitlang« and »Zeitlang haben nach …« Young women have Zeitlang when they are not with their sweethearts. Longing for the present does not exist; one does not feel Zeitlang for the here and now. For Proust, the present was too short, too fleeting, too inconstant: he was searching for a fixed point. The long journey into the past, that was his element. He was determined: after a few stations he left the train of his own time and set off on the endless journey into the distant past. And it was in the past that he found, and invented, his Combray.
All of us resist the flow of time. Those who want to do so, swim upstream, in vain. Proust did not get involved in the struggle against time and its agents, which made time stronger than him. He took time onto his own terrain, he climbed out onto dry land and walked the way back – in the other direction, not downstream. He was like a Sisyphus who will not play the game, who throws his load to the ground and leaves. He replaced time’s flux with a fixed point which he chose himself. Proust ignored the present in favour of his imagination. This is not as easy as it seems: with good reason we call the present pressurising, aggressive and demanding. You cannot create the present as you can all things past; the imagination cannot reach it – it keeps destroying our fantasies. A recherche du temps actuel is unnecessary and impossible. And indeed, Timescape is also a recherche du temps perdu – without its ever having been planned like that – and at the same time it is a recherche du temps retrouvé. Some of the people who look at the pictures in this series will rediscover a time which they thought had disappeared, and had forgotten.
The clock We can measure time, yet measuring it will never make it visible. We do not even really know what it is we have measured: this question remains unanswered. The ever-popular picture of the clock is nothing more than a picture of the clock. A clock does not show time. It is a sign, an exhibit. As the picture of time it remains a corny joke.
In the Timescape picture series, time is driven out of its hiding place like a fox from its hole. What we see is not time itself. It wears an infinite number of magic hats and masks, like the enigmatic Shakespeare in the Droeshout portrait. And why is it invisible? Because we are time. And to ourselves – which we stare at in the blind mirror – we remain invisible. We are time; we are what ravage ourselves and our cities, under the pretext of »building« them. And consequently, Timescape makes time and, equally, human beings visible. Reading the Timescape pictures »between the lines«, we are on time’s trail. Time never reveals itself, never changes shape – like rubber or water. Time: the Grimm Brothers’ Rumplestiltskin and Kafka’s Odradek – incognito and invisible, impalpable, but we sense it is there, omnipresent.
We, not clocks, are the measure of things and so also the measure of time, which, like the air, can never be seen itself but only through reaction and precipitation. The wind leaves its impression on the surface of the water, as people engrave themselves on the earth. The phenotype of time is similar to that of air: both are fleeting, not immediately recognisable, only really noticed with the passage of time. Timescape shows the flow of time: multiple metamorphoses which can be deciphered in layers like a palimpsest. Like all pictures, the Timescape metamorphoses reduce visible reality by one dimension, from three to two. But looked at together, they add to those two dimensions another one, the fourth dimension, which is time, so they become three-dimensional.
Mnemosyne Without her, we would know very little about time. Photography enables us to keep an eye on time. A photograph inevitably shows the past. Barely immortalised, and then gone. It dies and is born. This is the drive to hold on to the present. It dies during birth, »navigating the tightrope between imminence and absence, being at once accessible and unobtainable, perpetually present and at the same time distant enough to create a chasm …« Françine Prose wrote this about muses, and particularly about Edward Weston’s third and last muse, Charis Wilson. The sentence could apply to all muses and also to time. Time: what is it other than a muse – the muse of photography? Insofar as photography has a muse, it can only be time – most likely the Titan Mnemosyne, the muse of memory and the mother of all muses.
Time is the most important theme of photography. Is it ultimately the only one, its bottom line? The history of photography is the history of endless attempts to seize time: reaching into an empty profusion, an overflowing vacuum – nevertheless and therefore always repeated. Photography is the perfect way, if not the only one, for us not only to fix the visible but along with it the invisible: time. Only then can we understand Max Beckmann’s paradoxical demand: »If you want to touch the invisible, penetrate the visible as deeply as you can.« In order to do this, a remarkable number of photographers repeatedly try to make their time visible and recognisable, to get hold of it in their pictures. Even if it is unintentional, they have done this in every picture. It is unavoidable.
Not the same In the sixteen layers of Timescape-Metamorphosis No. 313, only the line of vision and the location are the same. These elements are the ostinato in the Passacaglia of time. After the six million four thousand five hundred and seventy minutes, or 100.076 hours, between Phase 0 and Phase 16, some things have changed, but not everything. In no sense does Metamorphosis 313 show the »same thing sixteen times«. The city space exists in many parts in Phase 1, in some parts in Phase 10, and in what is currently the last phase, not really at all any more.
For this reason, the place is not even given a name. A verbal description of where it is, an address, would mislead; it would distract from the fact that time alone is the theme of the metamorphoses. Replacing images with words is somehow contemptuous. By putting words in place of pictures, you seek to defend the picture, you detract from its impact. These are descriptions of time and not place. »In words the picture would serve no purpose,« as Edward Weston would say. Only the temporal definition is important. That is why it is given as accurately as possible. The observer’s own ability to read pictures is sufficient to solve the riddle of the location … if it is important to him or her. Isn’t an unsolved riddle far more interesting than its solution?
Distances »Time is the longest distance between two places.« Which places? How far apart are the two points? The »two places«, 313.0 and 313.16, are in no way the same. What do they have in common? Nothing more than geographical co-ordinates. The place and its atmosphere no longer exist the way they did twelve years before – or only in a rudimentary way, occasionally in a vague suspicion or memory. If they have remained unchanged and intact, then decay is just taking its time. It has been practising patiently; like Pascal, it has had no time to be brief. For once the process was not quick. It may take a bit longer but it will take its course.
Maceration Timescape: a chain of metamorphoses, a stocktaking sequence. In scientific terms, Timescape is a bit like the description of the process of maceration. One after the other, the parts are photographed and then disappear. Whether the thing as a whole remains or dissolves away is of no consequence. Everything changes, and thus stays the same. To be or not to be: here the question is not asked. The way things are shown in the metamorphoses is only temporary, the finale is only provisional. The earthly life of the little bit that remains will be long or short. We cannot know it and we have no influence over it.
Time’s basilisk stare is fixed and steadfast. Nothing can touch it. Time is cold and incorruptible as a camera and film. But we, who use them, interpret with our emotions and warmth. We establish our losses and welcome in the new. The Timescape chronicler identifies with two figures, one real and one invented. The real one is Goethe’s Eckermann. In some ways he took on the role of Goethe’s muse, like the above-mentioned Charis for Weston, or Lee Miller for Man Ray. And the invented figure is Serenus Zeitblohm. In contrast to Eckermann, he did not observe a person, but rather an era. You would not really call him a muse.
Inventions To invent something new, and to create something previously unknown, the inventor uses methods which are already known. He uses elements which are readily available and which he does not have to invent. He simply transfers his material into a new order and useable systems. This is what Klaus Honnef says about the invention of photography: »The individual elements of the photographic process had been known for a long time … Bringing them together meant the invention of photography.« In a similar way, Timescape uses intellectual and technical concepts which are familiar to some of us. A scientific system thus develops out of random ideas. Timescape goes far beyond the concept of »before and after« pictures, through its specific methods, the precise definition of the concept, the precise documentation, through its geographical, intellectual and temporal dimension – but also through the unusual quantity of the pictures, which turns into a unique, specific quality. An ocean of pictures, in which one could almost drown – especially the author. Photography, the most representational of all the analogue arts, is art and science in one. Photography enables us to unite these two qualities. The science of seeing and recognising: in photography, this becomes an art.
Abridged Version/Blurb Max Beckmann recommended painters to do what photography can do, alone among the arts: to penetrate the visible as deeply as possible, so as to catch hold of time, the invisible. This is the driving force and motive behind photography: constantly reaching out towards time, towards the invisible, into the overflowing vacuum and the empty profusion – in vain and with rich rewards. Timescape is an early form of cinematic art, a series of metamorphoses like Muybridge’s studies of movement, an extremely short film about infinitely long time, where time is the leading lady and spaces, structures and objects are the window-dressing, in a continual process of decay and rebirth. Timescape is three-dimensional photography: it reduces visible reality from three to two dimensions, but it adds to them another dimension, that of time.