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Michael
Snow
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For
the past forty years, Michael Snow has moved at will from
one discipline to another, putting into play, in the humorous
style for which he is famous, the conventions around the
way a work is received, represented, and narrated and
its duration. Snow takes up the question of duration in
an absolutely literal manner in the photograph Flash!
20:49, 15/6/2001 (2001), in which he stages Henri
Cartier-Bresson’s famous “decisive moment,”
that moment when the photographer, on the fly, captures
the climax of an action. “Taking photos,”
Cartier-Bresson said, “is to hold your breath while
all your faculties converge on the reality fleeing before
you.” Taking a photograph, Snow seems to reply ironically,
is to produce a reality to match the decisive moment of
a picture’s taking. Here, the image combines an
odd situation with a synchronized flash: a man and a woman,
manifestly seated in a restaurant, are captured in the
infinitesimal instant preceding the realization that will
make them react to a bizarre incident that will overturn
the objects in front of them. Snow makes judicious use
of the double meaning of the word “flash,”
as both the lighting device essential to indoor photography
and a sudden awareness.
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Michael Snow, Flash! 20 :49, 15/6/2001, 2001, laminated
colour photograph, 122 x 183 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
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