“Nature is always tempered, but on the moon it’s impossible to listen to Johnny Cash and watch the paint dry.”
(Jón Kalman Stefánsson: Your absence is darkness)
My exhibition is an attempt to expand the concept of time through the medium of photography by representing time as experienced and recorded in person. Snapshots of dawn runs taken from a single point over many years capture not only the changing weather and seasons, but also the subjective process of time and the incessance of life, as well as a photographic typology of money found in the street and in the pages of books, representing over four decades and the stories behind and within them. At other times, two parallel shots can encapsulate a whole year, the unsearchable mystery of which had to be captured in gold. And the connection between the seemingly endless horizon of the Ligurian Sea and the rock formed millions of years ago in the Beech Mountains is also illustrated by a few photographs.
In philosophical terms, time-lapse is a kind of paradox of time perception and understanding, which shows the tension between the subjective and objective perception of time. While the classical conception of time in the Aristotelian sense sees time as a continuous and uninterrupted change, time-lapse perceives it as a series of fragmented and cut-out moments, not only in moving images but also in the sequences, series and pairs of images in the exhibition. In my present creative methods, I also want to highlight that time cannot necessarily be seen as a smoothly flowing entity.
Moreover, according to Kant, time is not something that exists in itself, but a form of human cognition, and it is precisely because of my exhibited works that I tend to sympathise with this line of thought. In my own practice, time-lapse emphasises the same constructive character, since by combining my photographs, which are arranged in series, sequences and pairs of images, I aim to create a sense of time that does not exist in reality, at least not in this form. In essence, I want to question the objectivity of the perception of time. After all, the experience of time is not only related to the physical world, but also to subjective aspects of human experience. With my Time-lapse exhibition, I am in fact challenging traditional notions of a straight-line, continuous flow of time, and I want to represent this through the medium of photography.
Gáspár Kéri