I’m not sure why I work this way. Lack of confidence? Economics? The heritage of modernism–the autonomy of the photograph? Conservatism? What I do know is that in academia the arrival of digital has been treated as an event just happening, changing, or about to change everything we expect. Apparently, the arrival of digital is both a life-changing technological intervention and it returns us to a natural state of affairs in which poetics, represented by painting, is the predominant regime.
Poetics in photography means lost time or the lost moment. The photograph opens out to an attenuated moment, a suggestion of time passing that has a different experience internal to it. With a photograph we are presented with an image that is static but that nonetheless can give a powerful sensation of time passing.