Railroads make good subjects for my timeline series. They are particularly photogenic due to their slow and steady speed. Also, since their earliest invention, they have carried valuable symbolic cargo as signs of progress. To the American West, the iron horse and steel rails brought the power of industry and the promise of prosperity. Ferris wheels bear similar resonances, making a recreational show of structural and technological prowess. Late in the 19th century, it was the scheduling of transnational train lines in Europe and the concomitant foreshortening of geographic distances that created the need for synchronized clocks and internationally coordinated time zones.
All of the photographs in these series are timelines.
Produced in camera, the photographs are akin to seismographs and electrocardiograms in that they present a seamless left-to-right depiction of events that occured in front of the camera over a period of time. What appears at the left side happened before what appears on the right. The middle portion of the image represents the continuous, uninterrupted transition between the two ends. By implication, the timeline extends indefinitely off toward the past on the left side and indefinitely off toward the future on the right. Stated in an alternative manner, the “x†axis in these images represents the temporal dimension. More simply, x = time.
SELECTED FINDINGS
RELATIVE SPEED OF THE SUBJECT
The relative speed of an object affects its size in the image. The faster a subject moves by, the less time it is in frame, hence the shorter it becomes in the image. Slower movements result in longer, more attenuated forms. A person passing quickly on a bicycle becomes more narrow than a person walking by. Faster moving cars can look like Smart Cars and slower moving cars look like stretched limousines. Changes in speed are also registered. The rail cars of an accelerating train become increasingly foreshortened as they pick up speed.
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
My Taichi Motion Studies #128 was the first image that registered a single dance move in uninterrupted, narrative form. The left-to-right evolution of the image is akin to the structure of a sentence or a three act play with a recognizable beginning, middle and end. But many of my images have no such linear development. Instead, subjects are captured in an abstract, featureless setting of horizontal lines extending infinitely off to the left and right--no beginning, no development and no end in sight. It is as though the photograph recorded a cross section taken through the middle of the drama, as though a slice had been cut through the middle of the verb.
COGNITION
We have few if any predispositions--innate or cultural--that help us understand these images. The first reaction of many people is to erroneously assume the images to be artificial Photoshop compositions. Another common misreading assumes that the camera is traveling at very high speed, resulting in the extreme blurring of the background. Both of those understandings are based upon everyday experiences of contemporary life. But even when the process is explained and understood, the images remain difficult to grasp because we have few similar experiences and because we seem to have no intrinsic ability to think directly in terms of visual timelines.