In collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery Imaging Time: Understanding Photography as Time-based Media Discussion launched the 2019 festival.

This panel featuring Phoebe Boswell, Lucy Reynolds, Erica Scourti and Catherine Yass aims to explore the various relationships that photography has with, makes use of, and represents time.

Traditional notions of photography as frozen or captured moments have long since developed into narratives where the photograph acts as ‘a space of becoming’, in which meaning can be made and explored. Photography’s relationship with time has changed in the digital age, where images are increasingly vulnerable to temporal ambiguity through manipulation and retouching, whilst instantaneous production and distribution has also encouraged a resurgence and return to the use of analogue processes.

Through presentation of work and discussion we consider how we might understand photography as a time-based media. Following the event will be a presentation of 30 second films showcasing contemporary practices within time-based media.

Lucy Reynolds introduces and leads the discussion.

Phoebe Boswell was born in Nairobi to a Kikuyu mother and British Kenyan father, and raised in the Arabian Gulf. Boswell is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in London who studied at the Slade School of Art and Central St Martins. She is currently the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School, a Ford Foundation Fellow, and is represented in the United States by Sapar Contemporary, New York. Her current exhibition The Space Between Things is on display at Autograph, London, until 30 March 2019.

Lucy Reynolds is a writer, curator and artist whose work is focused on questions of the moving image, feminism, political space and collective practice. She is Senior Lecturer and researcher in the department of Media, Arts and Design at Westminster University. Her articles have appeared in a range of journals such as Afterall, the Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Screen, Screendance, Art Agenda and Millennium Film Journal. As an artist, her films and installations have been presented in galleries and cinemas internationally, and her ongoing sound work A Feminist Chorus has been heard at the Glasgow International Festival and Wysing Arts Centre. She is currently editing an anthology on women artists, feminism and the moving image.

Erica Scourti was born in Athens, Greece, and is now based in London and Athens. Her work across performance, video, and text has been shown internationally at institutions and galleries like the High Line, New York, Wellcome Collection, Kunsthalle Wien, Microscope Gallery, New York, The Photographers’ Gallery, Munich Kunstverein, EMST Athens, and South London Gallery. She is currently guest-editor of The Happy Hypocrite journal for art writing, and has just started a fully-funded PhD at Goldsmiths’ Art Department.

Catherine Yass is best known for her distinctive photographic and film-based work. Typically she manipulates her subject matter by overlaying the negative and the positive from photographs she has taken and then realises the resultant images as lightboxes, prints and films. In 2017 RIBA held a screening of the artist's film, Aeolian Piano, with the BBC. Recent solo exhibitions include Milton Keynes Gallery (2014); Alison Jacques Gallery, London (2012) a mid-career retrospective at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea (2011); The Phillips Collections, Washington D.C. (2011); Stedelijk-Hertogenbosch Museum, The Netherlands (2009) and St Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2009). She was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2002 and currently teaches MA Photography at the Royal College of Art, London. She lives and works in London

Thanks to the Photographers’ Gallery for hosting this event and a special thanks you to Joseph Kendra