Far from capturing the conjunction of reality and pastness (“that was”) that
leads Barthes to his well-known melancholic meditations on death and mortal-
ity, photography in Frampton’s conception operates on the“just-before”of con-
sciousness, the entire microtemporal domain of processes that remain abso-
lutely imperceptible to perceptual consciousness but that nonetheless inform its
emergence and indeed make it possible.
In this conception, the“photograph”(or still image) comprises one privileged
element (and moment) in a larger photographic process, which is to say, in a
process that does not reify the photograph as an exclusive, self-contained arti-
fact (as Barthes does), but that encompasses elements of pre- as well as post-
production–thepreaccelerationof movement-perception as well as serial, mini-
mally differentiated takes and variant developings of a single negative. Such an
“expanded”field plays a central role in Frampton’s revisionary history of
photography’s never-quite-explicit reckoning with time. Consider, for example,
the privilege Frampton accords Edward Weston, who“simply centered his fig-
ure, outside [humanly experienced] time and within the nominal spatial ground
of the photographic artifact, celebrating, with unexcelled carnality, the differen-
tiation of the moment of perception from all those moments of impercipience
during which the resting brain processes only two billion binary bits of informa-
tion per second.”Or consider, the role of the“Quintessential Sample”in the
practice of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who, notes Frampton,“speaks of decisive
moments, in tones that seem to suggest that the making of art is a process of
tasteful selection”. When he subsequently recounts his own encounter with Car-
tier-Bresson’s contact sheets, Frampton describes the process of this selection:
“images of a dying horse were as alike as intelligence could make them, and
I am constrained to believe that the‘decisive moment,’if such a thing occurred,
happened when the photographer decided which of the three dozen pictures he
would print and publish”.
Where cinema remains focused on its“appalling ambition”to mime the flux
of consciousness, photography offers the potential for–though not the actual
experience of, or at least any kind of sustained actualization of–perception
beyond perception. Photography, that is, opens vistas onto an imperceptible
that, following Frampton’s musings, would seem to liberate“our mind”from
“our body”, or more exactly, to awaken“another mind”attuned not to con-
scious contents but precisely to the indiscernible nuances that occupy and ren-
der dynamic the space between discrete, identifiable stages of movement. On
Frampton’s account, this potential emerges with the rapid-exposure camera
which is able to displace the“single epiphany”of the individual, privileged
photograph in favor of the seriality of“consecutive images.”A certainNew
York Times Magazinecover featuring the serial image of a former American Pre-
sident perfectly illustrates this displacement:
62 Mark B.N. Hansen