Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time
English · University of Minnesota Press · 2009
ISBN 9780816647392Verify editionNo verifiable published translation record was located.
Core question
Must photography belong to stasis, loss, and death while cinema alone possesses moving time? How does a photograph continue to become in viewing, opening both depths of recollection and unrealized futures?
Argument
Sutton extends Deleuze's crystal-image to photography and rejects the model of the photograph as a sealed past instant. Its actual surface and virtual memory form an open circuit through which a fixed image can lead into wandering recollection and accumulate future possibility. The book develops a taxonomy of photographic time through Goldin, Atget, Warhol, and others, contrasting it with cinematic time since 1895.
Argument structure
The discussion of the crystal-image extends from cinema to photography and to becoming within stillness. Actual details, activated virtual memories, and relations opening toward a future compose the photograph's temporal problem. The comparison with cinema concerns how movement changes those relations.