Photo Fringe 2024

I think something subtle and private happens when a hand touches the camera. A silent ‘hold onto this for me,’ not spoken but gestured by placing a finger across the shutter button, a ‘let me retain a presence for future absences.’ The photograph is like that, it prevents the flower from withering or pauses a leaf mid-fall and lets us cling to perishable things.

This play upon time is at once beautiful and confusing, and it disorients me when I speak of it. Whenever I articulate the still image, I tend to trip over my tenses. Should I say, “look at how it opened its petals,” or is the photograph locked in the verb form of present indicative? When we capture the budding buttercups, do we partake in a creation of permanence — a place where they’re left endlessly blooming, never to be plucked? I am torn between a then and a now, and another deferred then again. Roland Barthes writes of such a collision as an anterior future, a punctum of time.

These photographs all cause this dizzying lacerating wound. I like to think they float in what Emily Dickinson calls forever ‘composed of nows.’

From this — experienced Here —
Remove the Dates — to These —
Let Months dissolve in further Months —
And Years — exhale in Years —

A photograph then, a kind of forever.

Dominika Jarečná is a Slovak curator and writer based in London.

Image credit:
© Sam Laughlin Ash (Four Photographs Totalling Ten Days), 2024
Part of A Place in Change