The relationship between photography and time is generally clear-cut. Existing in a temporal balance with it’s subject, the photograph acts as a document of a past occurrence, an assurance of that which has been.[1] As such, it is an ideal medium for exploring notions of time and memory. In We’ve been here before, Mark Fawcett and Heather Fulton use photography to engage with time in non-linear ways.
Over the past few years, Mark Fawcett accumulated a group of misfit photographs. They didn’t quite fit into a particular part of his practice, and yet they lingered in his periphery. These disparate images developed a coherent meaning for Fawcett following a life-threatening medical incident. In retrospect, these haunting images appear to evoke his own mortality. Fawcett gathers these photographs in his series, Premonitions. Using long shutter speeds and double-exposures, Fawcett captures a sense of impermanence and absence. These clairvoyant photographs present a hazy vision of the future, and suggest the frailty of our own existence.
Heather Fulton hinges her work on this experience of fleeting vision. Drawing upon her own history of memory loss, she visualizes the frailty of memory through alternative photographic processes. Embracing the faults of her medium, such as irregular exposures and film grain, Fulton goes a step further by intentionally damaging her negatives. By boiling her film in hot water, or burying it in the earth prior to printing her photographs, Fulton inscribes the passage of time into the film. These faded, degraded photographs reflect the sporadic quality of fragmented memories. Views of the recent past are captured, then almost immediately dissolved, suggesting a suspension or reversal of time. Fulton's manipulation of her photographs lends representation to this alternate experience of temporality.
Fawcett and Fulton challenge linear timelines through photographic processes. Here, the distant past appears clearer than recent memory, and the future reveals itself years in advance.
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1. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: reflections on photography. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 115.
