CHAPTER 7 Time, Space, Imagination, and the Camera
IN SEARCH OF TIME
In his Confessions (397–400) Saint Augustine summarized the complexity of defining time: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him that asks, I do not know.” Even physicists find the nature of time to be inexplicable. Time is baffling; it seems to flow past us, or we appear to move through it, making its passage feel subjective and incomprehensible. Yet a camera can purposely immobilize a subject in the flow of time for contemplation, giving photographs exceptional properties that other visual media do not possess.
When Albert Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, he proved that widely held concepts ...
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