Marking time: photography, film and temporalities of the image

Whilst the invention of photography may have introduced a novel conception of time within the image, it is arguable that this only became fully articulated with the arrival of film. The technological, semiotic and aesthetic affinities between the two mediums only heightened a perception of the radical differences in terms of their supposed distinctive temporalities. This essay explores the writings of Kracauer, Bazin, Barthes and Metz to consider the ways in which photography and film have consistently been theorized as fundamentally distinct mediums as regards the temporalities they embody and the experiences of tense that they promote. The essay goes on to suggest that such orthodoxy is in the process of being challenged by, on the one hand, theoretical approaches that suggest that photography might involve more complex notions of time, and on the other hand, by the increasing convergence of the technologies of the moving and still image and the ways in which this has been exploited by contemporary artists.