Time and Photography

Despite our stereotypical ideas on photographic images as snapshots (slices of time), photography is fundamentally a time-based medium. The relationships between photography and time are manifold: time can be directly represented within the image, it can be its theme and philosophical horizon, but it can also represent the global framework in which photographic practices develop and change through time. It is the ambition of this book to bring together the various aspects of time in photography as well as photography in time, and to illustrate them in a series of case studies that focus on seminal authors (e.g. Fox Talbot, Victor Burgin, Robert Morris) and genres (e.g. spirit photography, montage photobooks and tableau photography). The selected examples range from the very first photographic pictures to the most recent cross-medial uses of photography in and outside art. Written by international specialists for a non-specialist audience and displaying extraordinary breadth and erudition, this book reshapes our vision of photography in order to include many crucial yet overlooked aspects of time, culture and art.