![]() ![]() ![]() A meditation on photography’s seeming ability to stop time follows, concluding with the photographs of Hiroshima and the photographic nature of the atomic bomb. This analysis leads Bailly to elucidate photography’s relation to material and visual reality. Inspired by the unexpected coming together of these two iconic images, the book begins by retracing Talbot’s invention of the photographic calotype in the early nineteenthcentury, highlighting the paradox that saw Talbot wishing to imitate the representative arts of painting and drawing while simultaneously liberating the image from any imitative paradigm. A rare find of intellectual caliber and theoretical rigor, The Instant and Its Shadow pursues a unique and powerful reflection on the first hundred years of photography’s history and on the essence of the photographic art in general. These two images underpin a poetic and theoretical reflection on the origins of photographic technique, the imaginative power of montage, and the relation of photography to time itself in Jean-Christophe Bailly’s The Instant and Its Shadow, translated into English for the very first time. First, William Henry Fox Talbot photographed a faithfully realistic image of a ladder against a haystack in the English countryside.One hundred years later, an anonymous photographer captured another ladder, “photographed” alongside an incinerated man by the blinding light of the atomic bomb. A compelling and innovative reflection on the way photography captures and condenses time Two photographs, connected by a ladder, separated by a century. ![]()
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