We say that photography freezes time or capture the moment, as though such a thing were possible. Time that is frozen is no time at all. Photography is actually based on a passage of time, a chunk excised from linear time according to the whim of photons. It has a beginning and an ending and therefore is an event, or a duration, be it twelve minutes or one one-thousandth of a second. At the same time, a photograph is the record not simply of duration but of a duration made to resemble a "moment," a time outside of time, time turned in on itself, because the beginning and end of its duration are collapsed into an object, the photogaph. The final image seems still and is made in that wy to resemble eternity.
Abou Farman -"Clerks of Passage" in The Believer: Issue 58, Nov/Dec 2008. pg. 14
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