On Photography
What
is Creative?
a pizza, a chair, a book, otherwise you
have
things that are already made -Angel, Far Away So Close
In Western thinking we have come to take time for granted. It exists right? I doubt any in the modern world really question it much anymore. But, there was a time, (no pun intended,) when time itself was questionable, when men were seen as angels, and Egyptians buried their treasures in their sepulchers, for a time, we frankly, cannot believe.
A tree was cut down yesterday. I counted the rings and was surprised to find it 46 years old.
Scientists have hypothesized that the first millisecond of the big bang is the template of everything. Presumably, if they get back far enough they will find God. Certain all created matter leads them there, they are still looking.
But what existed before that? The West still correctly says (materially) nothing. We are not ancient Egyptians.
In one of Updike's novels a theological graduate school computer nerd smokes out the hidden God by complex algorithms, where after months of complex calculations on his computer he thinks he sees God appear for an instant on his screen, but henceforth loses the equation. For a moment he thought he saw God.
Time is possibility.
Time is the possibility of the new.
In the old school of photography there are these little numbers here that determine exposure, things like 1, 10, 5, half, slices of time, slices to make something out of what is not.
For the artist these kind of numbers determine everything.
© 2006 Timothy Martin Gillan
Photography
