Miroslav Tichý & Julia Margaret Cameron – Long Moments

Exhibition catalogue no 37
No of pages: 64, color, illustrated
Binding: soft cover
Graphic design: Sandra Praun, Designstudio S

Language: Swedish and English
Year: 2008
Publisher: Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
ISBN: 978-91-976646-1-5

I have never done anything else than letting time pass by.
I go to town and must do something than just doing nothing.
So I was simply pressing the release.
MIROSLAV TICHÝ

Movement, laughter, a wink, a word – click – a moment captured inside the camera and later released to spread out on the paper. The magic of photography that is created in the dark by letting in light for a certain time. Physical turned abstract turned physical again. The transformation from colour to black and white, from three-dimensional to two-dimensional. Movement is frozen, sound is silenced. Time has stopped in one eternally long moment. Time – a fundamental concept that is nevertheless hard to define. Time – a crucial element in photography. The poetry of photography comes from the artist’s awareness of the interplay between light and time, and it invites the viewer on a voyage through a world characterised by attempts to erase the boundaries between past, present, and future.

I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me,
and at length the longing has been satisfied.
JULIA MARGARET CAMERON

Two artists who have chosen photography as a means of expression, separated by an era. Their works are fundamentally different yet related, they seem contemporary yet timeless. They are united by a will and ability to capture the spirit of their time and immortalise it. The respective visual idioms of Miroslav Tichý and Julia Margaret Cameron are the result of vastly different circumstances. Tichý took startling images that make the depiction appear exciting in all its familiarity. Cameron has portrayed celebrities in relaxed moments and their families as idealized beauties. The activities of both strive to capture the commonplace and hold the extraordinary, in an attempt to make the ephemeral moment last longer or minutes to appear spontaneous. (…)