Photography, Temporality, and Modernity

This book examines the photography's unique capacity to represent time with a degree of elasticity and abstraction. Part object-study, part cultural/philosophical history, it examines the medium's ability to capture and sometimes "defy" time, while also traveling as objects across time-and-space nexuses. The book features studies of understudied, widespread, practices: studio portraiture, motion studies, panoramas, racing photo finishes, composite college class pictures, planetary photography, digital montages, and extended-exposure images. A closer look at these images and their unique cultural/historical contexts reveals photography to be a unique medium for expressing changing perceptions of time, and the anxiety its passage provokes.

Kris Belden-Adams is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Mississippi, and specializes in the history and theory of photography and contemporary art. She is the author of Photography, Eugenics, 'Aristogenics': Picturing Privilege (2019), and the editor and contributor of two chapters to the volume Photography and Failure: One Medium's Entanglement With Mishaps, Flops, and Disappointments (2017).

Chapter 1: Photography and Time; Chapter 2: Photography, Instantaneity, and the "Frozen Moment"; Chapter 3: The Fluidity of "Narrative Time"; Chapter 4: Asynchronous, "Sculptural" Time and the Racing Photo Finish; Chapter 5: A "Tapestry" of Synthetic, Hypothetical Digital Time: NASA's Whole-Earth Photogarphs as "Data Visaualizations"; Chapter 6: Conclusions; Index