now, for a little while

Video (00:21:29)

2023

now, for a little while is a short video compiling polaroid photographs paired with sound recordings of the moments before, during, and after the image is created. The series was created between February and May of 2023, and is ongoing. Sound expands the depth of time by intervening in the photographic process and hovering for a few seconds longer. Sound and image simultaneously exist in an ouroboros, holding infinite space in the ether between life and death. The forced intimacy of viewing the video encourages the spectator’s active participation opposed to passive viewing as time is suspended equally in both past and present engagement.

The images and sound recordings, created in tandem, are my collective, multi-faceted self-portrait, intended to turn the portrait back onto the spectator. Inspired heavily by Roland Barthes’ philosophical explorations in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, specifically punctum defined as “element that rises from the scene, shoots out of it like and arrow, and pierces me,” and studium, “the order of liking and not loving.” The images and recordings were only created during times in which I had an undeniable urge to document. This guiding principle for my practice was intended to transcend the obligation of creation by acting on intuition, in an effort to follow a line of inquiry into how punctum could be generated. Sound and the still photograph have always existed together at the moment in which the shutter of the camera is released, the moment that Jean-Paul Sartre (quoted by Barthes) refers to as “the abrupt click breaking through the mortiferous layer of the Pose…” in now, for a little while, the click is the serial process of the polaroid camera, performing the near simultaneous tasks of taking and giving a photograph.

Sartre’s reference to death is echoed through Barthes analysis and exists as an overarching theme in various bodies of my work. Barthes refers to the photographer as an agent of death, condemning all subjects to the realm of what has been, a “spirit image of a living or dead person.” My previous work, we are the ghosts of our future, shares this sentiment, a collection of portraits created in ethereal and ill-defined forms of people who existed in the moment, a moment in which we can never return. My current self-portrait series contemplates the reality of past states of being which cannot be held, but are tethered to the present through sound, image, and the participation of a spectator.