Splitting Instants

            In The Primacy of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty quotes Rodin: “’It is the artist who is truthful while the photograph is mendacious: for in reality time never stops cold’” (185-186). Merleau Ponty continues discussing painting’s ability—for he speaks of painting where Rodin speaks of the artist—to portray motion in spite of its motionless form, while claiming that the photograph fails to capture this motion, or that it merely documents a moment in time that is without motion, where the painter can reveal something human but un-scene in the capturing of between moments.

This takes me back to high school digital photography in two ways. The first was a demonstration—by the teacher—of how a fast shutter speed could catch an object in motion and make it appear motionless, Rodin’s complaint. But, also, how a slow shutter speed would capture the blur of the motion. Now, I suppose both of these support Rodin’s, and by extension Merleau-Ponty’s point that photography “destroys the overtaking, the overlapping” (186). Although, it seems like a photograph that captures a person or animal mid-step would be as much depicting those “overtaking” and “overlapping” moments as a painting does. However, it also reveals a certain expectation of movement, or a certain expectation of between movement and time that photography gives another perspective to.

The second way this section reminded me of photography was a motion assignment later in the semester. We were to take pictures of a fountain in Forsyth park with a slow shutter speed and a fast shutter speed. This assignment was about teaching us the different effects we could achieve with a camera—different effects that reveal something about our ability to perceive. Take, for example, the difference between these two pictures of water. The one is a fast shutter speed. 

The fast shutter speed captures the shapes of water, not the movement. It reveals something that we would never be able to see on our own in a way that it is possible for us to perceive it. This photograph is only mendacious in that it dares to capture a moment that we would otherwise never see, but it does not lie about the limitations of our perception. The next picture captures the blur of a carnival ride spinning at a high speed

, blurs that could be taken for single objects if unfamiliar with photography, carnival rides, photography of fast moving lights, or it could be understood as motion, with all those in between moments where something is “leaving here, going there” (186), but not in the symbolic way picture of one hoof on the ground and the other taking a step, instead it is in a blurring of “here” and “there” that reveals the nature of movement—and the nature of time—as a constant between rather than an arrival, where it seems like a painting of a horse with one hoof midair and the other firmly on the ground is more of an arrival at the between: “they have a foot in each instant” (186) than a true depiction of being between. This does not take away the symbolic power of the painting Merleau-Ponty describes, but to “have a foot in each instant” is to be split apart between two places, where the photograph with the slow shutter-speed captures the experience of spreading across those two places and the space between that must still be traversed to get from one to the next.