Insignificant moments made decisive: exceptional photographs in OVR:20c

Photography has long been lauded for its ability to capture what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment – that split second in any given situation that, if recognized and acted upon by the photographer, best conveys the essence of the event, giving it its fullest expression. There is certainly some truth to this school of thought, but it also suggests that there can be only one decisive moment – that all the other moments leading up to or following it are somehow less valuable, less worthy of being captured. The power of photography is not that it captures the one, true decisive moment, but that it captures moments at all. The camera takes what is fleeting – often so fleeting that it goes unnoticed – and makes it visible and enduring, thus imbuing it with meaning and significance. Presented in ‘OVR:20c’, each of the following images – in their own way and without the aid of digital trickery – emphasizes this capacity of photography to make permanent what is otherwise ephemeral. And if one looks beyond the literalness of the subject matter, it becomes clear that, in all of these examples, the traces of time are what is actually being depicted. Insignificant moments made decisive.

Soungui Kim, Parrot & Indian, 1999
Arario Gallery, Seoul, Cheonan, and Shanghai. 

Because it was shot with a simple pinhole camera, which requires a long exposure time, Parrot & Indian is a mostly indiscriminate blur. But this ‘failing’ is also the image’s greatest strength. Blur in a photograph is the result of movement, and in this case, the movement comes not only from the foliage and the small bird at the upper right, but also from the exposure time itself. What Soungui Kim has captured with her pinhole camera is not a singular moment in time, but rather many moments over time, one turning into another, each one just as important as the next. Parrot & Indian is not about the detail we cannot see, it’s about materializing the passing of time.

Erica Baum, Untitled (Simbolismo) (Blackboards), 1994
Galerie Crèvecœur, Paris

While she was a student at Yale, Erica Baum photographed classroom blackboards that still bore the chalked remnants of the day’s lessons. Even once ‘erased,’ many of these marks remained, often having new marks made on top of them, leaving layered traces of the lecturer’s process – thoughts and ideas hastily rendered in chalk, only to be made obsolete as they were replaced by new ones. In Untitled (Simbolismo), the blackboard symbolizes time itself, where each moment comes and goes, continually superseded by the next. In the simple act of photographing the blackboard, Baum effectively seizes those ephemeral marks, preserving them for posterity.

Andy Warhol, Montauk Beach, 1977
Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City

Although photography was central to Warhol’s practice throughout his career, the stitched photographs he began making in the 1970s diverged in many ways from his previous work. Unlike the found photographs he used in his celebrated silkscreens, Warhol’s stitched works were made from photographs he had taken himself. Sewn together with needle and thread, they are unmistakably handmade, in contrast to the machine-produced look of his soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles. One element that remains constant, however, is Warhol’s use of repetition. In the stitched photographs, he combines multiple prints of the same image. As with the examples by Kim and Baum, there is also a temporal element here, but rather than a succession of moments, Warhol presents the same one over and over again; his momentary experience of Montauk Beach not just preserved but made recurrent.

Carlos Leppe, Biblia/Pietá, 1982
Galería Isabel Aninat, Santiago

Along with two written texts and a translation, this work by Carlos Leppe also contains 11 printed photographs. The images themselves are not (and were not intended to be) examples of masterful technique or aesthetic excellence. They are functional documents – each print records a moment during a performance-art piece that took place in May 1982, in which a gender-reversed La Pietá was enacted. Through photography, Leppe’s performance piece lives on to be experienced decades later and by new audiences. Yet it remains only in fragments. And while these fragments do not recreate the performance, they do give it new meaning – a fleeting experience changed but not diminished.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Masturbine and The Fart, 1984–85
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York City

On the face of it, the sculptures in these photographs, created by Peter Fischli and David Weiss by combining ordinary items in unusual ways and in precarious positions, offer a little comic relief in an artworld that often takes itself very seriously. But looking beyond the obvious humor, the real meaning here is not in the objects but rather in the photographs themselves. How long before the shoes in Masturbine become disentangled from the uncertain ball into which they have been knotted? The knot of shoes, however, will undoubtedly last longer than the seemingly insecure formation of chairs, bottles, and aerosol cans that makes up The Fart. Like performance art, these sculptures are also fleeting; they can only be experienced in a particular moment. Unable to sustain themselves, it becomes the job of photography to fix and secure them, to offer permanence to the otherwise ephemeral.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, 1985
Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich

While perhaps best known for his work documenting the BDSM subculture of 1960s and 1970s New York, Robert Mapplethorpe made numerous self-portraits throughout his career. In this example from 1985, four years before his death from AIDS-related illness, he offers a more subdued, less provocative and more existential version of himself than that depicted in many of his earlier self-portraits. Here, he is not dressed in drag or leathers, he does not have devil’s horns, guns, knives, or whips. In one sense, he is unmasked. Yet this is also one of only a handful of self-portraits in which he does not stare directly at the viewer. Instead he turns away – this gesture emphasized and made active by the blurred movement of his head, which leaves a ghostly trace in its wake. It is not simply a fleeting moment that endures, it is Mapplethorpe himself.

Dr. Laurie Taylor is an Associate Lecturer in History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London and Assistant Editor of The History of Photography journal.