Photography, Time, and Tenses
Fighting Boredom with Photos and Grammar
I’ve had a lot of time to sit and think about pictures recently, though I did just move to a new city (Philadelphia) and start a new job (PhotoLounge). I know moving and starting a new job are not typically life events conducive to sitting and thinking, but part of that new job is digitizing photos which is, almost by definition, just sitting and looking at pictures. The thinking comes naturally when you’re scanning the 11th or 12th slide carousel of the day and your podcast backlog has run dry. The repetitive, rhythmic motions of gently dusting each slide, placing it into the scanner, picking it back up carefully once scanned with my white cotton glove, and placing it back in its original place, all lulls me into a state where thoughts just flow. The images flash by and I sit and think.
A few weeks back, I started scanning a binder of black and white negatives. I won’t say who’s negatives or what they were of, for privacy’s sake. I don’t even pay much attention to the content of the images while scanning – as long as I can tell that the exposure is right and the colors look correct, I don’t really need to know all of what’s going on in the image. But what I will say about these negatives is that they were dense, meaning they were very, very dark. Each strip looked like five flat-black rectangles lined up next to each other, until I held it up to a light or the window revealing just faint hints of images. This wasn’t a problem of quality; a dense negative is even sometimes preferred to preserve detail in the shadows of the final print. But what I learned right at the beginning of scanning this specific binder is that the scanner I use at work (a real relic, running off an ancient Dell with a fresh install of Windows 97) is that a dense negative takes sooooo much longer to scan. Whereas I could normally scan six or more well-exposed negatives a minute, I was now waiting two or three minutes for a single image to feed through the machine. So I had a lot of thinking time ahead of me, and I thought about a lot.
I thought about time, as one does when a job is taking much longer than expected and the pixilated numbers in the corner of the screen tick closer to the numbers that mean you can get up to eat a sandwich. I grew tired of my eyes involuntarily flitting between the preview image and those little numbers. I wasn’t particularly antsy to be done, but there’s something about a clock that makes me want to look at it and calculate how long I’ve been sitting and how much longer I’ll be there and how many images I’ve scanned since 10 and how many I’ll be able to scan before 1. To take my mind off all that, I thought about time and pictures.
It was funny, I thought, that whoever made these negatives years ago overexposed them by an extra couple hundreths of a second, the shutter staying open for 1/100th of a second instead of 1/1000th, an almost imperceptible sliver of excess light hitting the film, and here I was years later spending entire hours more than normal scanning them. I didn’t curse the photographer (God knows I have binders full of intentionally and unintentionally overexposed negatives). But that extra time before the shutter closed on each image really compounded when it came to scanning. Well, at least I have a scanner, I thought. At least I wasn’t in the dark waiting for an enlarger to beep down the minutes until dev-stop-fix, three hundred times over, to see tiny little contact prints. I wondered if any of these images had been printed in a darkroom, and what those terrifically long exposure times might have been. These negatives, and all negatives, are linked to that instant they’re taken in so many interesting ways, I thought, my mind rolling along with the low hum of the scanner in the background.
The exact time these particular negatives were linked to was many years in the past. You could tell even if you didn’t see the date Sharpied at the top of each page – the clothes people were wearing, the cars in the background, and the haircuts (especially) all told you when the images were made. The photographs were of a time that I only know from movies and TV and some of my parents’ and grandparents’ old pictures. I couldn’t look at these pictures without instantly connecting them to the past: the time before I was alive, before I have any personal reference. But aren’t all pictures, I thought as I tucked a scanned negative back into its sleeve, pictures of the past?
I guess it is obvious that you can’t have a picture unless it was taken. But photography has always had a rocky relationship with time, more so than other art forms, because it is implied that a photograph documents something as it was. The whole conversation about photography and representation and “truth” is not quite something I feel qualified stepping into, but isn’t it interesting that we have to think about photographs in the past tense? Sure, it is easy to see why the black and white negatives in my cotton-gloved hands are in the past tense, but are the pictures that I take really in that same past tense? They’re certainly newer, made with a digital sensor, but that doesn’t make them in the present tense. Even if I took a picture yesterday and the ones and zeros of the scene are still sitting latent on my SD card, I still took the picture yesterday, past tense. It’s not hard to imagine someone, maybe, looking at my photos far in the future and commenting on the hairstyles of the early ‘20s, and associating them with the past.
I was reaching a good midway point through the binder at this point in my rambling thoughts, and decided that it was in fact time to eat my sandwich. As I ate I looked at my phone. I checked my email, texted Taylor, and inevitably ended up on Instagram. It felt a little jarring after flashing through so many black-and-white images all day to suddenly have bright, colorful pictures pouring from my phone.
I finished my sandwich and got up to fill my water bottle, still on my phone. I was looking at a set of pictures a friend had taken on a recent vacation, and wondered if they were back in the country yet. The pictures, of beaches and big blue sky, said to me they were still away – I looked out the window to see the sky still grey and raining in Philadelphia. But they could, I thought, be back home posting those pictures from bed, or even back at work posting from their desk. But looking at those pictures, that bright sun, my friend’s flashing smile, it felt like they were taken in the present.
I sat back down at the scanner, donned my gloves, fed the next strip of negatives into the machine, all the while still thinking about how those vacation pictures were bending time. Were these images actually in the present tense? A picture can’t be taken in the present, but what if it feels so close to the present that we perceive it as such? Like a math function that approaches 1, never truly getting all the way there, but coming infinitely close. Some pictures are shared and seen so fast, they are at .0000001 if the present tense is 0. The line between past and present becomes hard to distinguish.
Or could it just be the context? Instagram and most social media platforms are built around instantaneous sharing, encouraging you to take and share pictures quickly and often. Most apps have a camera function built right in now, so the act of capturing and sharing becomes one smooth motion. No wonder it’s hard to tell when an Instagram picture was taken when it first pops up. But outside of the platform, most of these pictures would fit right into any family album, as memories of a good time, a time certainly in the past.
It seems like pictures, unlike written words, can morph between past and (just about) present tense without any input from the author. Someone reading a written sentence in the past tense will understand it in the past tense whether the sentence is in a book, on a screen, up on a billboard, or even read to them aloud. You would have to change the words to change the meaning. But pictures change tense with only context and time. If I take a picture right now and share it right now on Instagram, it will be in the present tense to those who see it today. “Oh look, Evan is working at his desk right now.” But if I take that same picture right now, and hold on to it for a while, or if I post it and no one sees it for a couple weeks, it will slide into the past tense. “Evan was working at his desk.” How we perceive the tense in a picture is directly related to how much time was between it being taken and us seeing it. We can’t really know when that shift happens exactly, because it happens sometime when the picture isn’t being looked at, closed up in a shoebox or hidden at the bottom of your Instagram profile. The binder of negatives that I was, yes, still scanning, might have once been close to present tense, if only when the photographer themself inspected the film coming out of development. But sometime in the intervening years they changed, without anyone really noticing, and now I saw them as solidly in the past. The tense of an image, like a loose print or a strip of negatives, is thin and wavering.
Now, I want to digress a bit to talk about grammar. It’s only because I was thinking so much about past and present and “was” vs. “is” that I Googled “English tenses” as a particularly long strip of negatives ran through the scanner. I learned that English, and many other languages, have different categories within the tenses that further specify what is going on. For example, the present tense can either be simple or continuous. Present simple is “Evan takes a picture” and continuous would be “Evan is taking a picture.” These categories can also slide into past tense – “Evan took a picture” and “Evan was taking a picture.” We sometimes use simple and continuous interchangeably, saying whatever sounds best or what fits most snug in a sentence. But we can also intentionally choose one mode over the other to be more clear; simple shows the action happens all at once, and continuous shows it happening over a length of time or is still happening. I know the difference is subtle, but it does matter for the analogy I’m about to make.
If pictures can have tenses, it would make sense that they fit into the simple and continuous categories as well. Continuous pictures say, “This thing is happening right now” or “This thing was happening at a certain time.” They show an action as “in motion,” stretched over a span of time, whether happening now or happening in the past. I thought about it for a while, and news pictures, sports pictures, and a lot of pictures on social media all feel continuous to me. Maybe they do because they are all taken with the intention of communicating something specific, something greater than the image that can’t be described in a single frame. Continuous pictures have to be about something specific because the photographer and viewer have to agree on what the picture is about. The picture leans on that continuity.
Simple pictures, on the other hand, say simply “This thing is” or “This thing was.” They are pictures that do not immediately speak to something outside of the frame. They exist on their own to describe a very visual, very specific instant of time. A black and white Ansel Adam’s image of the sunrise falling over Yosemite feels like a simple picture, and so does the picture of flowers my grandma takes in her backyard just to show the women at church. This is not to say we can’t draw meaning from simple pictures, but the meaning comes more from the viewer than the image or the photographer. A simple picture can be straightforward or ambiguous, but either way, the interpretation is left up to whoever is looking at it.
By now I (finally) finished scanning all 302 rolls of film. I was just rotating, renaming, and reorganizing all the JPGs to be nice and neat for the photographer. I couldn’t help but categorize the images in my head as I went – all were certainly past tense, and most were simple past (a good portion were street photographs, which might be the most past-simple kind of pictures). But some were past-continuous; pictures of events I recognized from history, pictures of holidays and celebrations, and in particular pictures of friends laughing about something I will never know. Looking at the smiling faces, I don’t think pictures can slip as easily between simple and continuous as they can between present and past. No matter how much time passes or how much context is given, I won’t have the knowledge to understand these images the same way the photographer or the subjects do. Once a picture is made in a continuous way, it is linked to the event and the context that makes it continuous. And while we can always read a simple picture in a new way, and even use it to talk about a larger topic, the fact that we can always go back to reading it as a “this is” moment makes it forever simple.
In the end, the photographer was very happy with their scans. I didn’t let them in on the full photo-existential thought train that ran through my head the whole time I was scanning, but I figured they’d have enough to ponder already. I could only imagine the combination of joy and anxiety that comes with looking through a few thousand images that had been hidden away in a binder for who knows how long.
I’m not really sure what insight my photo tense thoughts have brought me, to be honest. I could see this system making it easier to sus out the intention in images, to better understand what a photographer is trying to say with their work. I can also imagine it making the work of sequencing and editing my own work easier, piecing past and present and simple and continuous pictures together like sentences in a lyrical essay. But I could also see these ideas not being much help at all. It might just be an example of how perplexing communicating with pictures can be, and how much we have left to learn. If photo grammar is anything like English grammar, it’ll be a while before we all wrap our heads sufficiently around it.
Thank you for reading to the end of this more rambly one. I wanted to stick a reminder down here that the second volume of Arizona Road Dust – OASIS – is available on my website. About half of the first edition has sold now, so you’ll have to pick one up before they’re all gone!
banger! i’d argue that ansel adams’ photos of yosemite, and landscape photos in general, might be examples of the closest a photo can get to being present (continuous? i think?). the same sunrise still happens every day, on pretty much the same scene!