Time Traveling in the New Millenium

Photographs are time machines of a sort, capable of moving our minds around the universe without concern for its physical structure or direction of flow. For 170 years they have allowed us to tell stories about the past and the distant with a voice of specificity and authority. And we continue to rely on them, maybe never more conspicuously. So why do I now feel less willing or less able to time travel through the photographic image? I think there are a couple of reasons for it. (You probably know them too.)

First, it is increasingly difficult to identify the context in which photographs were made, and whether they were made in a "traditional" sense at all. Despite time stamps on digital files and, in some cases, geographic information, making a mental leap through time and space requires something else: belief in the "reality" of the destination, or at least its "integrity". Indexicality (i.e. the direct link between image and imaged) is no longer an assumption of photo-based work (at least not the way it used to be, before Photoshop) so destinations pictured within photographs hold less and less promise for real habitation. Why should I travel through time and space if there is a chance, upon arriving in a foreign land, that I won't have any air to breathe or ground beneath my feet?

Second, the number of photographs now in circulation is essentially infinite for anyone with a computer. Committing to the time-traveling potential of any one image requires an investment that I find increasingly difficult to make. It used to be different. I remember being easily projected to other times and places when absorbing the archive of photography meant visiting museums and slowly turning the pages of book after book. And I remember wanting to know details about people and processes. How did Carleton Watkins haul his huge glass plates around Yosemite and Mariposa Valleys back in the 19th century? What was Cartier-Bresson doing in India and China and Mexico and how could he be so quick? Now, I have a harder time with details (I almost resent them) and I just can’t fathom visiting all the times and places that currently compete for my attention. I resist being transported by images because their demands, like their numbers, are essentially infinite and feel like an invitation to annihilation, a total loss of self. I still want to live my life, here and now.



Carleton Watkins, 1866, ‘Yosemite Valley from the Best General View’ No.2

I am moody, however, of two minds, and on another day I might argue everything differently. Time traveling through photographs has never been easier. Maybe the uncertain contexts associated with today's images actually invite imagination, allowing us to move through mental time and space faster than the speed of light. Maybe the vast seas of imagery that now flood our shores will turn us all into time-traveling sailors, thus beginning a new Age of Exploration. I don’t know which set of interpretations I like better or which is more accurate but I do know that my moods about photography are becoming simultaneously darker and brighter.