Project Proposal

Over the winter break, I did some research on the practice of putting culturally significant items into a time capsule. From this I began to wonder how might the connotative reading of a photograph be affected by hermetically sealing the image and instructing someone not to open the container until a specified date. How indeed does the passage of time imprint new meaning on a photograph? Susan Sontag might say that a photograph accumulates more significance as it gets older and is viewed through the lenses of history. Roland Barthes also contemplated this conundrum when noting in Rhetoric of the Image that the maker's intention behind a photograph is most likely to be understood by an audience in the present.


This project ideally will ruminate on that very question of what happens to a photograph's meaning if the image itself is isolated from visual culture for a set period of time especially if that image is never seen by anyone in the epoch in which it is created. The Conceptual ethos of "art entirely in one's mind" definitely comes into play. Someone in possession of one of my hermetically sealed photos can only imagine the photograph's content; affirmation that the photograph even exists at all may not come for a very long time. I'd also like to address in this piece a certain amount of self-flagellation and anxiety I have as an artist. A working title I have for this series is Maybe this will be important to someone in [x] years.

I have envisioned this piece tentatively as an airtight and watertight container holding an archival inkjet print on fiber paper that comes into the hands of anyone interested in having one. Instructions on when the container can be opened are addressed when the container changes hands. This presentation seems to be abound with issues though that I'm hoping I can work through in this class to make something really thought provoking. For instance...

What might be good subject matter for these images?
Is the mixture of self-flagellation implied in the title and the allusion to a scientific practice confusing?
If so, which direction should I dedicate this piece to? Pathetic and nostalgic time capsules that speak to my own self-doubt and lack of confidence or an empirically conducted study of history's affect on reading a photographic image?
How might I insure against the possibility that the overly curious might just open the time capsule EARLY??

Let's go, Multi-Level!!