Photography involves a choice. It is a reflection of a portion of reality. Whenever you look at a still image, the only certainty is that it reflects something which has taken place: that person, that object – or both- were there when someone took a picture of them.
Things you can see photographed existed. Sometimes you can tell they are most probably still there.
Other times you know the subject changed. What has been photographed doesn’t exist anymore in that shape: the tree lost its leaves, the little girl crossed the road.
Again, the only fact we can assume from a picture is “this was there”. And in that phrase we feel the presence of the time passing, with things changing and evolving. We experience the past and by doing that we recognise a form of death: as Barthes says in Camera Lucida, photography is “a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”
Keeping that in mind, “Qui, Ora” is an attempt to capture life, translating its constant motion into still images.
