Carina Khorkhordina. Quantity of Visibility

This hommage was made as a response to an impulse from outside — an invitation to think about time through photography. Normally I don't preconstruct the situation in which I photograph, but here I have acted in a slightly authoritative way, and this step towards constructing made me think about the modes I often operate in. One such mode is: going out of the house, getting somewhere and starting to photograph there — nothing is staged, yet this is a kind of a constructed situation, too, even though it is natural for me. This conclusion has reconciled me with the need for additional action — I put a book opened on a page with the reproduction of Dust Breeding by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, onto a music stand, so that the dust could start collecting on it. As days went by and I documented this object every now and then, my attention was shifting from the quantity and visibility of dust to the process of collecting: it was not so much the dust that was being collected, but rather the photographs, i.e. the glances. The series of photographs of a room corner where you see that nothing is changing and everything is changing, is a model indicating the passage of time. Returning to the mode of photographing the surrounding space in general, I think about the words of a Russian photographer, Alexander Sliussarev: "What you constantly encounter is the disappearing time. So you live and photograph what is, it seems, always before your eyes, but no... Everything disappears. <...> And the internal realization of this makes you think: what will be there if you won't photograph it? There will be nothing, simply nothing."

(Будь терпелив!)

BE PATIENT!