I’m no expert on photography but it seems to me that photographs exist in some uneasy place between what we know as the mutable ways of memory and the desire for an absolute record of what was. So you get all those memento mori photographs of dead children from the early days of photography, the visual ethnographies of “vanishing” civilizations, the records of “pristine” landscapes prior to the influx of settlers. You also get the shots of a curve, of shadows, of drapery that alternatively masks and reveals the human shape — these shots that begin the tale of perceptual shift, of the essential fluidity of the world in which we live. I tend to gravitate toward the second type simply because I tend toward relativity rather than absolutism.

Given the nature of photography and the eye, pictures often speak with a spatial grammar that takes for granted the standard 3-dimensional spatial reality we perceptually inhabit. Within that basic world the artist often plays with light and shadow, shape and texture, all things which make explicit reference to that 3-D reality. The techniques make us aware of the possibilities of space in new ways. But there are other ways of seeing, of organizing and referencing perception, and one of them is the time dimension. I haven’t seen that many photographers that play with time but today, when I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery, I saw an exhibition of the photographs of Scott McFarland. My.

Much of his work stood out for me. It was  a bit overwhelming to tell the truth so after I saw these two pictures below, I just couldn’t take any more in and I left. I work just down the street and plan to go back after work tomorrow but in the meantime I’ll have to think about my reactions. What he does with time in these two pieces seems to me quite important for a number of reasons. Of course there is deconstructing the idea of photography as some sort of direct link between our visual sense and some idea of objective truth, but that seems to me far less important than what he seems to be saying about time and its relationship with the specific disposition of the world of objects.  If you look at the two photos, you will see that several different times of the year are represented in each photo and then presented to our eye as if they were one unified time. I have to say that does all kinds of weird things to my head. I suppose that is because my experience of time is strongly cyclic, with each season, interpenetrating the next for sure, but still, resolutely coming one after the other after the other. What the photographs do is blow that up and say, nope, it is really this way. I like that, even if it is discombobulating.