Mean Time (2020)

Mean Time is a 9-minute film, with sound, made during a residency with Collective Gallery in Edinburgh.

The film invokes a consideration of photography as a product of a way of looking at and thinking about, the world prefigured on separating or shuttering it.

The film includes a quote by the theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay which calls for a critical unlearning of photography and its histories. The quote is cut up, spaced out, to slow down the act of reading so that words become fix words to the image behind them; giving each word or phrase a sense of weight and forcing a new reading of both.

Mean Time contests that minor forms of photography, (including postcards) have the potential to access instances of undertheorized and overlooked connections capable of expanding and questioning how we understand historic global events, as well as our everyday relationships to the world, and to time.

‘Mean Time’ is also the calculation of solar time, sometimes referred to as clock time. It is used as the work’s title in relation to the experience of, or feeling about, a certain period of time as being troubled or unjust.

A text, by the filmmaker Alex Hetherington which was commissioned by Collective to accompany Mean Time and can be read here.