Seeing Time in Place: Lenses and Human Histories
Microscopes, telescopes and cameras: These are lenses that would let us take in more of the world than the unaided eye can show us. Cameras can even reveal TIME to us in instructive and helpful ways towards knowing our place in the world and in history. If we are blind to time beyond the now, we miss much of the wonder of any given point within it. We fail to read our own stories as pieces woven into the larger narrative of place and moment. This fanciful ramble posits that, if we choose to let them teach and change us, the history of light from the camera’s eye can offer insights into this wonderful, bewildering matrix of passing and approaching instance.
I am a child of the age of Disneyland (the TV show that predates and funded the theme park by that name) and my brain’s view of time was permanently altered by what I saw there for the first time.
Sunday nights, home in front of the round-screen television set (half the size of a modern refrigerator), my favorite Disney programs transported the audience from their Naugahyde Lazy Boys to the planet’s far-away places, for a first look at its curious and unfamiliar animals. There existed creatures and parts of the world that I would never have known or imagined without being taken there through this window of light and motion. This show (and others from the early 60s like Wild Kingdom) were, for me, in every way, educational.
These vicarious adventures were often delivered to us as vicarious visits narrated by a loquacious expert in a pith helmet. He interacted (or pretended to interact) with creatures doing what they do in their native places.
Maybe equally as importantly as the creatures and places for my later reflection and education was the way Disney used cameras. The medium was the message. Those creative and special uses for the eye of the camera showed me for the first time two marvelous ways of seeing that seemed like sourcery.
Today we know them as slow motion and time-lapse imagery. Although we may take them quite for granted today, they revealed a magical vision to an adolescent back then, and–-as you might have discovered in my sensory rambles-–I’m convinced our perceptions of the natural world and of each other can still be changed for the better by seeing the world intentionally, in accessible but out-of-the-ordinary ways today.
Although it has been almost sixty years since Disneyland, I still clearly remember ultra-slow motion stop-action sequences of bullets slowly piercing the full diameter of a watermelon or a light bulb. I can picture falling drops of red paint rebounding in a graceful splattering ballet of motion not visible to the naked eye because the action happened faster than our brains and optical software could process. There were, then, realities all around me I had not imagined. I’d best be paying attention!
In visual poetry, a green and twining rose stem gyrated upward, reaching out, searching in a spiraling pirouette, and soon appeared from nowhere a red sprouting bud bursting to bloom in less time than an Ovaltine commercial! Plants were alive after all!
The nuance and precision and beauty in the motion of living things and landscapes is often lost to our eyes, because too few frames a second can be processed in our brains. All we see is a blur of action without details. But the eye of the camera, with a little sourcery, can slow motion enough for us to see the intricacies and the beauty of motion.
Slow Motion
My jaw dropped in amazement. A housefly was able to turn upside-down just at the last thousandths of a second–-a maneuver that filled many full seconds in the clip. I watched in amazement as a tiny acrobat stuck the landing on the ceiling.
I think of this wonderfully complex skill every time I swat an annoying fly that disturbs me at my desk. Damn you, Disney! What have I done!?
A robin in flight cambered its wings and even changed the pitch of individual primary feathers–-using the same skin muscles that give us goose bumps, which is the best action we can pull off with our puny feather-counterparts we call hair.
Visible before my young eyes, see the impeccable timing and skillful motor planning of an ordinary bird prepared to land, like an aircraft increasing drag and slowing its approach before touch-down, pack-paddling its wings to create drag and not life.
The target for the bird as I watched was a single distant and tiny branch, not a miles-long strip of concrete. Bird, from full speed to full stop in mere seconds. Beat that, Boeing!
I think of this when a garrulous swarm of September starlings rushes from nowhere to temporary perches in the pines out my window, every dark-pearlescent one of them a consummate gymnast in heavy traffic, tumbling and diving in air, with no small satisfaction, I’d wager. The judges give them a perfect 10.
So the take-home for a fifth-grader in 1960: Rapidly-happening things could be slowed down enough to show details of motion too fast for a ten-year-old city boy’s eyes to take in.
There was more going on around me — even just out in the flower bed under the front window–-than I would have known, but for these few Sunday evening photographic special effects. But there was more!
When you’re done reading, come back and view this short video of precision flying by red kites (a kind of hawk) swooping down for bits of bacon (watch how they say no-thanks to the bread scraps with such precision!) And there are additional video links at the very end. Worth a look!
Time-Lapse
The first time-lapse segment I saw on early-days TV was the closest thing to sourcery I had ever seen. The process since has been demystified. Normally slow-changing objects or scenes were filmed over hours or days or even entire seasons through an unmoving camera lens to reveal glacially-slow and otherwise imperceptible changes of form or color. This was not the photographer’s or the camera’s creative animation work but an otherwise-invisible property of nature itself.
Here was a reality at hand just outside my door–-a state of flux and motion happening every second of every day in our oblivion. I couldn’t see it with my own eyes, but I was made able to imagine and to know it, having been shown the existence of this grand motion and dance. In subtle ways, it gave me a new lens for seeing the world for as long as my eyes last.
From this kind of photography came landscapes–-desert or mountain top or seashore scenes–-captured over full light-and-shadow-shifting of dawn to dusk, daylight melting beautifully into the after-dark appearance of the Milky Way and wheeling constellations overhead against fixed and motionless objects in the foreground.
The spinning field of stars revolved majestically against the blackest heaven, slashed by bright streaks of high-altitude jets and meteors and sometimes stroked by the fast-moving squiggly red taillights of auto traffic in a city at night. The busy-ness and stir of a single twenty-four hour day anywhere in this world was anything but ordinary, if we had the eyes to see it!
The Marvel of Rotting Fruit
The time-lapse episode that perhaps I remember most vividly involved the delightful horror of watching a perfectly lovely bowl of fruit shrivel, go gray with mold and turn finally to a black liquid-–a natural, everyday process of decay that took many hours, then compressed into a twenty-second insight into the end of things.
About that time and with the almost-instant demise of fruit in mind (maybe 1960?) I was smitten by a series of images of a family that appeared in Look or Life — one of the glossy oversized magazines of the day. It displayed portraits of a family taken in exactly the same position on exactly the same day of the year for a few decades running.
The eye tracked the frames of the series through changes of period-appropriate hair styles and clothes-–and faces, of course-–from before the birth of the first daughter, through the grade school years, until new babies appeared, grew and morphed towards adulthood. Before the end of the series, the father disappeared from the pictures.
The message was not lost on me, not yet a teenager, that this chronology of portraits was just another way of depicting the fate of the bowl of fruit. Aging is time passing through us, and leaving us altered imperceptibly every year, every season, every moment that passes.
The world of motion and of change swirls around us and within us, even as time moved ever so slowly from one Christmas to the next back then.
Acorns and newly-weds, toddlers and forests, from germination through senescence to death and decay, all follow the buzzing, swirling astonishing dance of life-in-time whose NOW is the only glimpse we know of it, unless imagination holds our eyes to the knowing lens that gives us a glimmer from the medium of time.
Where Does Time Take Us?
We stagger in our hurried lives from now to now and forget how we have come here. We live in each present moment, marching in place, mindless of the path behind us and ahead. Myopia of yesterday and tomorrow makes the Big Story invisible to us. We cannot know the wisdom of the book if we forget each sentence as we read it and move on, unchanged.
Cameras from space now do what Disney did for us in early days of timelapse, showing us decades of change to glaciers, deserts, the metastasis of night-blinding glare of cities into space, and the bleaching of the last coral reefs. We can no longer say our aided eyes are not equipped to see our impact across generations of time.
We walk only in the present and this is our mortal predicament and impediment, while the consequences of today’s choices stretch out over the lifetimes of forests and rivers and of mountains and bustling cityscapes where our distant children will make their lives.
With wiser eyes, we might nurture a personal ecology of connectedness to place, and from that place to all places by coming to see ourselves and everything within our viewfinder held together and flowing in a common tide of time.
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