Passing Time

Is it possible to visualize passing time, to connect our own subjective temporal perception with objective units of time? One’s personal, inner sense of time is abstracted from the outside world and its pace and dynamic depend solely on one’s experiences, the events one lives through. By contrast, objective time can be measured in exact units. Can these two time planes be synchronised? That is exactly what Balázs Deim attempts with his latest experimental photo series: the stream of images, which grew and transformed over a year, traces time, now rolling leisurely, now flashing past, with camera obscuras planted in public spaces and other analogue photographic processes. The series poses both relevant questions about life and professional problems related to experiments with the technique of photography. It takes seven units of time (year, month, week, day, hour, minute, and second) as its starting point, and looks for possibilities of visual representation that are closely related to both the particular period and the other pieces in the series. Each photograph was exposed as long as the corresponding period: the one about the year had an exposure time of one year, and the one about the second, one second.