Fascinating. It brings to mind Wilde’s Dorian Gray but inverted. ‘The photograph is the one machine we have built for the express purpose of lying to us about time.’ Wilde’s version has the portrait absorb moral corruption while the man stays young; your version has the picture just staying as a child, indifferently, while the actual person ages “off-camera.”
The price of a medium that freezes one moment and lets everything else keep happening.
Thanks for this. I’d not really thought of the images as innocent (or uncorrupted) but I can see what you mean. The use of photographs in children’s books certainly seems to have an explicitly moral function. ‘L is for Look’ is a really excellent survey with remarkable examples.
Fascinating. It brings to mind Wilde’s Dorian Gray but inverted. ‘The photograph is the one machine we have built for the express purpose of lying to us about time.’ Wilde’s version has the portrait absorb moral corruption while the man stays young; your version has the picture just staying as a child, indifferently, while the actual person ages “off-camera.”
The price of a medium that freezes one moment and lets everything else keep happening.
Thanks for this. I’d not really thought of the images as innocent (or uncorrupted) but I can see what you mean. The use of photographs in children’s books certainly seems to have an explicitly moral function. ‘L is for Look’ is a really excellent survey with remarkable examples.