Honey

There is a passage in Slaughterhouse-Five where the main character, Billy Pilgrim, comes into contact with a species of extra-terrestrial beings called “Tralfamadorians” and asks them why they selected him over anybody else. To this, one of the beings asks Billy “Have you ever seen a bug trapped in amber? Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.” 

Since reading this passage, this particular quote at the end has shaped a lot about how I think about my relationship to time and to photographic truth. Almost all of us are encultured to see photography as the most accurate representation of reality, second only to reality itself. We often take this for granted, overlooking the countless ways that photographs can be manipulated and how truly far removed they are from the reality we experience.

As human beings, we experience reality in four dimensions. Three spatial (X, Y, Z) and one temporal. Although photographs are two-dimensional, they are not simply a slice of space, but a projection of the three spatial dimensions onto a two-dimensional surface. However, a photograph almost completely sacrifices the fourth dimension of our reality—the temporal. Each photograph we view is a discrete moment that doesn’t accurately represent the passage of time. 

In this project, I rigged my 35mm film camera to function as a strip or slit-scan camera, in which part of the spatial dimension is sacrificed in the final image but the temporal is represented. The camera itself stays stationary, but as the film passes over a small 1mm-wide slit with the shutter left open, the final image captures the passage of time over a minuscule portion of space.

If the traditional photographic truth we understand is “amber,” then these photographs are “honey,” allowing subjects to have their true temporality represented, rather than only a discrete moment of time.