Time
The clockmakers’ secret
That mysterious thing
One of the few certainties we humans have is that all that we know is subjected to time. It transforms, erodes, annihilates and ages everything. It is all swept along by the river of time, which runs just one way. Thence the beautifully suggestive expression arrow of time, which physicists employ to designate this relentless advance, always in the same direction. We can walk forwards or return the way we came, but time is irreversible, it ploughs on without hesitation: there is no way we can go back to the child we once were. We move without respite and without remedy towards the abyss or, to put it less dramatically, towards an eternal embrace with the stars.
We know that the concept of time is a necessary human invention and that it has varied over the course of history. As scientific knowledge has progressed, it has become a kind of rubber –with great elastic capacity– which increasingly stretches towards the past and towards the future, from the Big Bang 13,000 million years ago to the already foretold death of the Sun, which will take place within some 4,500 million years. However, we are not equipped to assimilate such swathes of time because what really affects and disturbs us is subjective time, that is, the one we are in, the way we live it and the way we feel it. Our gaze cannot take in more than two hundred years of tangible, palpable life: from the world of our great grandparents, if we were lucky enough for our grandparents to tell us about them, as far as our life now. A cultivated person can imagine the prehistoric world –Jorge Oteiza said with a great sense of humour that we are only separated from it by 80 grandmothers– or project themselves into a science fiction future, helped, say, by Stanisław Lem novels. Our brain is not up to much more.
As well as being one-directional, irreversible, unapproachable, elastic and subjective, time is also invisible. In this sense, as the French playwright and thinker Jean Claude Carrière –and principal source for this text– elegantly suggests, we could compare it with the wind. We see the branches it rocks, the dust it raises, but no-one can see the wind. And the same occurs with time: we only see its effects, the traces or wounds it produces.
Good intentions
Photography, with scarcely 200 years of existence behind it, is a clumsy and insufficient tool to take on the enormity of such a phenomenon with so many edges. Even so, photography and time have always marched hand in hand and are inseparable. Photography facilitates the return of the past, furnishes us with the sweetly painful pleasure of submitting ourselves to nostalgia and also eternally conserves the fleeting presence of the referent, of what has been photographed. Then again, it is attributed with having the power to register a cut in the flow of time, freezing it, as if immobilizing movement gave us the illusion of seeing. Subtracting density and weight from these ideas, we could do worse than recall Salvador Dalí’s maxim which can be applied to photography: “The least that one can ask of a sculpture is that it stays still”.
The instant in its maximum expression, the protracted moment, the struggle against the passing of time, deep time, wounds and traces on the body and on objects, historical time, personal time, returning to the past, going back to the future, the end of our time, diving through memory, transience, the imminence of death, the durability of images… these are the approaches to this mysterious dimension offered to us by the artists participating in this tenth edition of Getxophoto. Some are painful because of the rawness they reveal; others have a balsamic effect due to the poetic notions they contain. They were all slowly selected pursuing the light shed by two ideas. The first, drawn from a conversation with Christian Caujolle, whom I dared to ask one day what he reckoned made a good photograph. “A work resulting from honest work whose aesthetic resolution is satisfactory”, he replied. The second, the fact that it ought to be time that moved, fascinated and pierced, that is to say, time should be the punctum –a now familiar concept coined by Roland Barthes, and Caujolle was, precisely, a pupil and collaborator of his.
Our time
There runs a legend that, at the end of the 17th century, a secret society of clockmakers decided to meet periodically to regulate the rhythm of the tick tock and, gradually, speed it up. From century to century. They wanted to harmonize it with the tempo of society, so the mechanics of clocks would match the rhythm of contemporary life. But this is an illusion. A second lasts the same now as it did 300 years ago, it is only the reading we make of it that changes. Today digital watches have triumphed, telling only the time at the precise moment and not the time it isn’t, as watches with faces do; in addition to the time shown, all the other times are visible too. If all you see is a small rectangle with a number, you live a series of successive instants but lose the notion of being located within the passing of time.
We worship hundredths of a second, speed, because the bid is to gain time, but paradoxically there is no longer time to feel it. Nevertheless, there is hope because more and more voices are crying out for a return to the slow, to taking our time, instead of time taking us. Though we never stop feeling afraid of our own end, and fear of the unknown and vertigo in the face of eternity –how long will it last?–, it is a great consolation to know that we are fortunate to consciously live a privileged and exceptional fragment of time.
Jokin Aspuru
Born in Bilbao in May 1968, he holds a degree in Images Science from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. A former television producer, he worked at ETB (Public Basque Television) for ten years in their news services, specialising in live broadcasts. A former journalist, he created and directed the Basque-language cultural magazine UK Uribe Kostako Aldizkaria for another ten years. As a cultural agitator, he has promoted the publication of records, fanzines, posters and documentaries, as well as numerous photographic exhibitions. He created and founded Getxophoto and has been its director since its inception.