Poignant thoughts on photography & mortality, vanitas, frozen time, extrusive time and still time…

“Just as there is no real nature in painting, so there is no real death: everything takes place, right from the outset, in a totally linguistic dimension, which justifies the oxymoron and makes it acceptable and appealing. In photography, all this does not happen… the life presented is authentic and its death is therefore, in a sense, equally authentic.” ~ Italian Critic, Claudio Marra

Gary Schneider project, “Heads” a good example of extrusive time http://www.garyschneider.net/Portfolio.cfm?nK=8950

Another example of extrusive time is Francesca Woodman’s self portrait series taken in abandoned houses in the mid-1970s: http://www.studiointernational.co.uk/photo/woodman.asp
“Woodman’s ghostly presence as she seems suspended across a barrier between life and death is in fact a refusal of photography’s particular capacity to fix its subjects in time and space… Her reintroduction of time to the photograph is a kind of resistance to the death implied in photography’s fixing of time and space.” ~ British photography professor Chris Townsend writes in Woodman’s eponymous retrospective,