Earlier in Part Four you considered the argument that the ‘mechanical’ nature of photography precludes it from being considered an art.
• Does this make photography a medium uniquely suited to portraying time and the passage of time?
• Can other creative art forms deal with the concept of time to the same extent?
As part of my previous research into looking at visual communications that explore time and place, I found that throughout history, even primitive artworks have told stories by conveying time in their work. The passage of time can be depicted in multiple ways with repeated characters and images, symbols, gestures and even the way the images are laid out, within ‘frames’ gives a sense of progression.
It's obvious to me that photography is not the only means of portraying time. It has its own unique set of methods and signifiers that artists use to explain the timeline within the shots. For example where a comic book strip might show events as they happen one after another and use lines and clouds to show a character ‘running’, photography might rely on the position of the subject and perhaps even be blurred, like in the previous images I looked at.
I don't think I could say one medium is better than another in regards to how they portray time. I do think that such concepts rely on more than what material is used.
Photography is different in that we know that what is being shown did exist in some way or another, and the way it expresses time will be different to most other mediums. This is also probably what distinguishes it further from other art forms.
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