In doing so, each contributed to the evolution of the motion picture. Series and sets of photographs may come to describe events that may have happened across a span of seconds or days or years. A month is seen to pass in a sequence of twelve small albumen prints that document the phases of the moon. A pair of daguerreotypes show the face of a man before and after he leaves for the California gold rush in 1849, both omitting and indicating his experience between the two sittings. A series of stereographs shows a landscape as it is transformed by the building of railroad tracks.
Photographs imply the passage of time by making change visible.
This ever-suggestive quality makes photographs a compelling part of the process of making both personal and collective histories. The flow of narrative creates a new continuum in place of the temporal one interrupted by photography. Seeing Time in 19th Century Photography looks for the traces of time in photographs and the places of photographs in history. Measuring, Stopping, Keeping, and Warping in Contemporary Photography . Joanne Chan , Curator of the exhibition Time-keepers at SF Camerawork, discusses the roles of time in the work of a diverse group of contemporary photographers.