The Time After

The Photography

Still photography and moving pictures are important media to me.  After studying cinematography I felt compelled to study the finer points of stills to gather them each in as a distinct medium and have each one instruct the other. The Time After looks at the two media in a different way, imitating one with the other to synthesize a captured memory of an idea more continuous that those normally found in simple static still frames. The blurb about Fogelson in the rear of the book notes that he uses an overlapping “multiple exposure technique” and that his “images are often shot with changing vantage points” that thereby take “a stance between motion picture and still photography.” His photographs are panoramas, often four or fives times as wide as they are tall, consisting of many overlapping shots of the same subject.  The book, therefore, is created at an approximately 4:3 ratio of width to height and is superbly well bound. The cover has great finishing touches consisting of a well designed title and name card extending around the spine and indented slightly, and an engraved main title with slightly varying depths of engraving for a shadowing repeated effect reminiscent of Fogelson’s works contained therein.  The cover and binding design alone make this book a pleasure to have laying around.

Anyway, it’s very right about his work, the blurb. His images of cityscapes, for example, are evocative of Ron Fricke’s groundbreaking work in Koyaanisqatsi, reminiscent of the transience and alienating nature of life near so many other souls.  Even the work consisting of traffic symbols on the street creates a landscape of familiar but often-ignored iconography. This is where his work is strongest: where it reinterprets a familiar image by repeating it until it becomes unfamiliar; by overlapping it until it is a broader idea.  This is also why his strongest images are those that have familiar points of light–a person’s face, a crosswalk stripe, or the bend of a river in an aerial photograph–on which we can get our bearings and by which we might interpret the meaning of the whole. The opening sequence in the book, leading from cloudscapes to barren topography and on to sprawling city maps and eventually to street-level cityscapes, represents a great deal more than the subjects of the pictures, calling to mind the transition from nature to “civilization,” the passage of time in the maturation of our relationship with the earth, and of the photographer’s relationship, spatially, to his subject. In book form, this is strong because the turning of the pages, the interaction with the chronology of the sequence, gives the reader a strong connection to the “alienation,” as the blurb puts it, that comes from extrapolating a subject as his multi-frame works do.

That said, unfortunately, this is also why the strongest part of the book is the inch-high reproductions of his works in the back. You see, even with the book’s aspect ratio as it is, his works often end up either cropped heavily to fit a two-page spread, or spanning several page turns. They are still evocative images, but lose some of the gestural quality of the full works as there is only so much that a layout can achieve with a work best viewed on a wall.  Even the essays (as well as the other textual inclusions) serve only to break up the allusions in the images with a tautology that might be better included as a post-script.

The Essays

Having said that the “fit and finish” is top notch, at least as far as the binding and cover design are concerned, the interior of the book leaves a few questions. After the introduction sequence and title page there are three essays, each accompanied by a single line of text. Quite simply, the presence of these essays probably doesn’t achieve whatever goal they were intended to achieve. The third of the essays, Lush Life: The Often Disconnected Worlds of Humanity and Nature, clearly written as it is, delineates Fogelson’s intent in his works and how they’re created. It explains his overlapping image technique and how it pertains to a theme of global warming and Earthly decay in a way that would best befit an afterward; it reads like something that might accompany a display of his works in a gallery–concise and insightful. The other two essays bring nothing to the images. Again simply, the first is an overwhelmingly large weapon leveled against an already very deceased equine, the second rather lacks in substance. But on their own, at least, they could be read and understood on their own terms. As they are, all three essays are too cumbersome to effectively act as intermissions between Fogelson’s work and are unnecessary as expository tools therefor. The text in the statements following each essay suffices in both of those roles. The layout of these text breaks (and the essays as well, actually) is strong and does it justice, but in the end any text appearing in this book again makes me long to see his works in a gallery.

The Conclusion

Fogelson’s works are contemplative of a single subject in a way that most photogrpahic studies are not.  His overlapping technique is certainly stronger with forms that extrapolate well, cities and people, than with, say, flora and landscapes, but the inclusion of the latter helps bring the overall theme of man and nature into utilitarian focus if nothing else.  This book succeeds, though, not because the theme is strong, though it is, but because it can lay on a coffeetable and be perused to the point at which a casual reader has gleaned some meaning very quickly, or it can be more meticulously examined to reveal a great wealth of thought.  To me, a photogrpaher, it’s just a shame that his almost grandiose visions have undergone a requisite retrofitting–his photos cropped and slapped across pages and essays wedged in uncerimoniously–to create this book.