The Friday Fillip: How Time Flies
Too fast, too slow, too big, too small, too quiet — most of what there is lies beyond our senses, which is intriguing, if also more than a little humbling. So ever since Galileo spotted the moons of Jupiter and van Leeuwenhoek watched his animalcules wriggle around, the rest of us have been fascinated by this invisible world made present for us by clever scientists and engineers.
Photography has played a huge role in gratifying our appetite for the imperceptible. There’s the obvious but now taken-for-granted ability to see aspects of the otherwise lost, invisible past, of course. And shots of galaxies, nebulas, and dust clouds take on startling hues thanks to frequency shifting. At the moment, time-lapse photography is enjoying a burst of popularity, as the patient collection of moments over time allows us to speed the clock and witness changes that would otherwise escape our attention. When you combine this ability actually to see change happen with the fact of human life, you get something that can be doubly fascinating — and a little uncanny (which, after all, goes back to “can” and “ken”, knowing and seeing).
The most dramatic example of this is perhaps the two minute movie made by Karl Baden in which the frames were still photographs of his face taken daily over the course of 8432 days, or 23 years one month and three days (thank you WolframAlpha) — from February 23, 1987 until March 26, 2010. Baden adjusted things so that by and large each still is registered so that his eyes in the centre of the shot remain in position within the successive shots. (I confess that the OCD side of me conceived of this idea many years ago; but I brag that the larger lazy side of me never took any steps to do anything about it.) I find it interesting to see how the effects of aging don’t appear strongly until towards the end. You might notice things differently. At any rate, here is Karl Baden over time.
This is clinical, which might take some of the wonder away. For a much more artistic but much less compressed example of lives lived, have a look at forty years worth of annual portraits of the four Brown sisters, featured recently in the New York Times. Here you’re not hustled through a life but have time to dwell at stations along the way and to appreciate the nobility and beauty of the subjects (nos semblables — nos soeurs).
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