Innervisions

We’re all familiar with that old Philosophy 101 chestnut: If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Now, let’s apply that to photography: If a person takes a photograph, projects it for one hour and one hour only, discards the photograph and never shows it in public again after those 60 minutes are over, did it actually exist?

Such is the question being raised by One Hour Photo Show, a conceptual photography exhibit that opened May 8 and runs through June 6 at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center.

In One Hour Photo, photography’s original impulse to capture a moment, to freeze and frame it, is turned outward, to the experience of viewing itself. The hour is the exposure, the moment that is captured in the frame of a temporary, provisional observation. Each work ceases to be a photograph: it erases its medium, its status as art object, as it becomes a pure moment of perception to be experienced, framed, and captured by the viewer. In this sense, the viewer becomes the camera, recording the moment on the unreliable format of memory. The viewer also becomes photography itself, as it feels its familiar constructs slip away: permanence, reproduction, ownership, control.

I’m intrigued by the ideas being presented here:  preservation, impermanence, and what it means to truly be  in the moment.  In a time when we constantly interrupt our lives to document them on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and the like, there’s something quietly profound about an exhibit that allows an experience to be, well, experienced, rather than mediated. In One Hour Photo Show, the only record the viewer has of what he or she observed is his or her own (shaky, unreliable) memory.