Documenting our Landscape

Berenice Abbott is nearly half correct. The photographic image re-presents an always already disappeared present, one that was captured in a fraction of a second only milliseconds after the photographer made the decision to release the shutter (there is a brief lag between the brain issuing instructions and the movement of the finger that releases the shutter). In this sense, the photograph captures only a simulacrum of the always already gone present, an already removed instant from the infinitely brief moment the photographer intended to capture. What is always already gone can not be captured except as a shadow, a trace somehow left behind.