3. The color of time

Where I talk about aesthetics and show pictures of a stunning cave

Sep 24, 2022

When you’re in an underground cave, your sense of the passing of time and your sense of scale are distorted.

Last week, I thought I was going to talk about editing but what has been on my mind since I last posted has been the relationship between aesthetics and technology. I am not a techie by any means, but I have always been interested in the tools used for creation and I have been baffled by AI image generators. I think they’re polar opposites to what the process of photography is.

This post is illustrated with photos I took during my recent trip to the Gorges du Tarn and more specifically the ones I took during a visit to the Aven-Armand limestone cave in the Lozère département. It is a pretty stunning place, discovered by the speleologist Louis Armand in 1897. I will just let the images I took there speak for themselves.

I made a conscious aesthetic choice to not use any type of photographic gear that would make me feel my work belongs to another era than the one I am living in.

I am very admirative of people using wet collodion plates and of the darkroom artists who print beautiful images on baryta paper, but I went through a process of thought towards the acceptance of the common tools of my time.

I have shot film for a long time, as long as it was still quite common, and was very emotionally attached to it. I have always been on the side of more neutral images, even though I tended to favor soft contract, low saturation color film and that changed a lot later. I began using a DSLR in 2007 and since I have used both film and digital. I ended up heavily invested in black and white in 2014-2017, and I made work that I love at this time, but I felt it was the end for me. Then I shot photos meant for monochrome with digital cameras, until I finally ended up thinking digital cameras are color cameras.

The problem is that I don’t want my images to be one more step removed from reality, and I want to avoir nostalgia of form.

I decided to use nowadays tools, a regular and good quality digital camera, and a few regular, very common lenses. Maybe it makes it difficult to stand out in the crowd, but I ended up having to admit that it’s not what I was trying to do.

What I am trying to do, is to document my personal experience of life in a truthful way.

For this, what is in the frame is important indeed but I feel the process behind is too. People often shoot film because they’re nostalgic of the way it looks. I stopped because it makes me feel nostalgic of a time that will never come back, and makes me feel the passing of time a bit more than what I want to.

Every technology seems neutral and cold when it comes out, then we become nostalgic of every type of technology left behind us. A lot of young people who were born long after the death of VHS seems to think it looks cool now, but what a relief it was when we finally could see the crisp and faithful renditions of the DVD images.

In the aim to document your personal experience of life in a truthful way, you need to be there, you need to have some kind of honest relationship to the reality of it, even though everything is a choice, from the framing of a slice of what you have in your field of view to the decisive moment you choose to freeze forever.

I think the coming popularity of image-making by way of artificial intelligence will help photography resolder its relationship to truth. More about that later.