Time and space, held in the photographic frame, is one of the defining characteristics of photographs. Photography creates fragments of time by freezing the moment of exposure, and space by extracting physical experience from the flow of life. The control of time and space within the frame is tied to historically specific ideas of reality within photographs. For instance, the British Journal of Photography argued in 1889 that instantaneous photographs were actually unrealistic because their ability to capture moving figures completely frozen and unblurred was a denial of time.
Technical development in photography has to a large extent endeavoured to manipulate and expand photography's relationship with time and space, from faster films to microscopy. Photographs have also been used to explore invisible divisions of time and space— from recording the firing of a bullet or a splash of milk to the work of Marey and Muybridge that turned the temporal and spatial flow of movement into discrete images.
The temporal and spatial dislocations embodied in photographs have made them potent metaphors for the passing of time and the fleeting comprehension of the moment. Writers like Marcel Proust and theorists such as Barthes, Kracauer, and Benjamin have all focused their reflections on photography on the way photographs intervene in time and space. Barthes famously summarized it thus: ‘The there then becoming here now.’ More prosaically, advertising photographers often strive to convey the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of using the product.
— Elizabeth Edwards
