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Photography, Cinema, Memory: the Crystal Image of Time

2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 51; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/screen/hjq036

1460-2474

Donald Fleming,

Photography and Visual Culture

Investigations into the history and phenomenology of photography and film can generally be divided into three overlapping methodological categories, outlined as philosophical/aesthetic, semiotic/sociopolitical and technical/industrial approaches. In Photography, Cinema, Memory: the Crystal Image of Time, Damian Sutton synthesizes and reinvigorates these existing paradigms by catalyzing a new and exciting encounter with the radical philosophical theories of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). In the abstract machine of visual culture that surrounds us, he argues, photography remains the prime molarity; and from this, cinema is derived. Initially setting out to reinterrogate the traditional links between cinema and photography, Sutton utilizes the lens of cinema the better to understand photographs (p. ix). In a lively engagement with the history of photography – ranging from the earliest camera obscuras through to contemporary digital images generated in the age of the ‘kino-brush’1 – Sutton aims to uncover a Bergsonian-inflected image of pure time and duration within photographic images. These are ultimately articulated through Deleuzian models of the ‘time-image’ and the ‘crystal of time’.2 Throughout the project he thus strives for a new way to see and understand photography, and ultimately aims to peel back the surface of the image to reveal a world of images beyond (p. x). Furthermore, he works to lay out a new taxonomy of photographic time-images that he illuminates through the work of photographers like Eugène Atget, Andy Warhol and Nan Goldin. The photographic images are also often compared and contrasted with cinematic representations of time found in the films of the Lumière brothers, Michael Powell, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Christopher Nolan, amongst others. Throughout his various investigations into photography and film, memory and time, Sutton subjects photography to a Deleuzian-Guattarian treatment to demonstrate how we can perceive becoming and immanence in the photographic image, and understand the photograph as always coming into being. In this manner, the project reengages with the entire history and theory of photography and offers new critical approaches the better to understand and appreciate photographs.