What Time is the Visual? Photography and the History of the Future

Abstract

Part of a broader inquiry that asks, "What time is the visual?" this article uses ethnographic observations and recent theoretical work to suggest that photography is as much future-oriented as it is a zone for the preservation of the past. I document different temporal orientations of photographs, drawing on historical studio images featuring clocks and photographic paraphernalia and ethnographic research into memorial images in Nepal and central India. I embrace Ariella Azoulay and Karen Strassler's insights and critique the paradigms established by Pierre Bourdieu and John Tagg. The article concludes with an experiment with photography's prophetic and analytic potential to make visible an "anterior future" in relation to the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster of 1984.