Beef Breakdown- Clod Heart
Photography is one of the greatest tools we have when it comes to time. A power that has always elusively held ranks in the world of abstract and ideal, time is the one convention that still holds weight over our experiences and existence. We can build technology to overcome our narrow foresight; cameras can capture split-second action, computers can calculate massive computations in seconds, and propulsion can allow us to travel in fractions of the time.
These tools help us map our understanding of time. Clocks keep track of it, and by the rotation of the earth we get a deep sense of time naturally. Nevertheless when you try to grasp time, it is ethereal, a non-object.
The inventions and tools like photography have allowed us to change and distort our perception of time. Transferring time from a memory-based form to something that can be captured in material residue like a photograph has had the effect of replacing our dependency on memories with the certainty of external evidence.
Time can be slowed down, paused, stacked, replayed and analyzed on a scale we couldn't do before photography, let alone before written word and language. We never really lived in any other time besides the present until the idea of time came to be.
The before and after, cause and effect brings newer insight into the world around us. We are compelled to have relics and reminders of our past, and hopefully help gauge where we head to in the future.
Breaking down our lives into segments, those segments are defined by the moments frozen in photographs. Returning to those moments frozen in time causes some sort of mental journey, bringing us back to that segment in time. Memories and senses, knowledge and understanding return. We recall what has changed and allows us to correct course.
Breaking up our experiences into bit sized pieces, we can better understand what we are doing over an expanse of time. Like these butcher breakdown images, it allows a complicated and detailed activity to be represented in digestible portions so that the process of butchering or any event in life can be easier to understand.
Recording our past is not an act of narcissism, it is a tool we use to reflect on our past selves in comparison with who we are now. Photography was first a tool of science, a way to make record of time and define where we are going. It is a tool to gain knowledge and helps us to grasp the four dimensional world into a flat, single moment. Photography can help simplify life and allow us to understand abstract things like life by restricting the context of time.
Clod Heart Breakdown 5, 2020. Digital Photograph.
Clod Heart Breakdown 4, 2020. Digital Photograph.
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