Beyond the Shutter’s Click

Centering Photographic Studio Practices to Explore Time and Place

Abstract

Photography is inherently linked to time, yet discussions of photography’s relationship to time focus almost exclusively on how photographs as objects convey, represent, and encode time. In this essay, I use arts-based research, narrative inquiry, lived experiences, and collected artefacts to a/r/tographically explore how photographic studio practice also conveys, represents, and encodes time. In four stories that span three decades, I show how my own practice shifted from being about photographs (objects) to photography (process). These four stories also caused new questions to arise, including: why use a film camera in 2020? I conclude with a brief discussion about how the materiality of film makes for an embodied experience.