Filipovic ~ Groom ~ Batchen ~ Borges: Past, Present, and Future

    I have always loved photography and with a camera in front of my face from time to time, it has occurred to me more than a few times that the present moment will continuously escape you if you are constantly trying to freeze it. As Geoffery Batchen put it in his article "Life and Death" (2010), photography is a "temporal movement back and forth between past and future."Looking back through photos that I take on a particularly beautiful location, it occurs to me that the time I spent composing, analyzing, tweaking the angles--the more I felt as though time evaporated. Maybe I didn't appreciate the present moment and the people who were around because I was so obsessed with getting the perfect photo.
The beautiful thing about photographs though is that they are, in themselves, timeless. Elena Filipovic argues fervently that time strictly a linear progression, claiming that  "there is no way to escape time." Films are in themselves, timeless because they are not bound by the laws of a linear progression of time. Flashbacks and flash forwards are quite clear, and in reality, these types of things exist too. When people are in a state of deep meditation, your mind is almost in a true state of euphoria. Its not that you aren't bound by time, rather that time is quite lucid and less structured. Dreams in the REM cycle of the brain are also quite similar. The person dreaming isn't living within the bounds of the 24 hour cycle. I have found through my own dreams that activities within the dream become quite stretched out and hard to decipher.  Really, as I read and reread and reread these articles again and again, it frustrates me that I cannot get a firm grasp around what time is!