death in photographs. time in photographs.
the time after exposure. what happened/happens after that?

In my research about time around/in photographs I find many examples of time/death, i.e in old pictures found in fleamarkets and antiqueshops. Not necessarily old pictures, perhaps something from the 80ies (I have one framed picture of a little girl in a kitchen, picture probably taken in the early 80ies. I've seen the picture about once a week for the last 6 months - and nobody seemed to want her, so in the end I bougth her for 20 cents). My interest is mainly related to the question why the picture ended up in the fleamarket, what happended to the girl - is she dead? who is she? What if she would be me? What is the value in photographs like this?

Other objects for research would be old photographs from my private family album. There are several photographs of people, pencil marked with a cross above them, signifying their death. This was obviously a typical thing in poor families in northern Finland.

This series of images would alos be mixed with faked images of myself as dead with a similar cross marked on top of my head (inspired by the film "the others") and
vanishing yellowish images, both found autenthic photographs and faked ones made by me.

Leena Saraste, a finnish photographer and author writes interestingly about the history of photography in her book "photography between tradition and reality" and Roland Barthes classic idea about the moment of death in portrait photography is also very fascinating. He talks about how a person dies everytime a picture is taken of him/her. That the moment is gone and the person dead.

My intention with this project is to study photography as a phenomenon of time and value bearer from historical, theorethical and philosophical points of view. In old times portraits had big value, photographs were evidence of life and death, of the existence of an individual. Today this has changed. Are we witnessing the death of meaningful photography and can/will our view on existence change within this development?
What will be preserved and how?