Still Moving: The Decelerated Image

Staged across a series of thought experiments, this essay explores the concept of deceleration at the intersection of photography and cinema. Beginning with a meditation on the language of photography, then turning to close readings of works by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bruce Conner, and Jean Epstein, my theorizations situate deceleration as an aesthetic and philosophical inquiry into time, made possible through photography and cinema's mutual imbrication, occurring at the juncture of the moving image stilled and the still image that harbors and indexes movement. If the decelerated image is capable of generating new forms of attention, then it is, in part, through its capacity to translate visually otherwise invisible correspondences between light and duration. What emerges is a new method of seeing through slow forms of contemplation. Deceleration is ultimately, I suggest, a form of visualization and witnessing revealed in the space between remaining still and still remaining, between the photographic fossilization of the world and its cinematic excavation.