Seizing the Light, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Catching Time

 

 

ANTICIPATING THE MOMENT

For most of the nineteenth century photographers had worked with extended time exposures that required forethought and the cooperation of the subject. As film sensitivity increased, newly invented shutters capable of isolating units of time in fractions of a second allowed photographers to control brief exposures. By the close of the nineteenth century, changes in artistic, philosophical, and scientific thinking about how time was measured and portrayed, along with developments in technology-based, mass-production methods, made it possible to gauge, see, and think about time in ways that were formerly unimaginable. The actualization of Herschel’s notion of the snapshot,¹ along with ...