Peter Wollen’s ‘Fire and Ice’ distinguishes stillness in direct comparison to motion. His essay analyses the key differences between the still image and the moving image. Playfully, he states “Film is like fire, photography is like ice. Film is all light and shadow, incessant motion, transience, flicker, a source of Bachelardian reverie like the flames in the grate. Photography is motionless and frozen, it has the cryogenic power to preserve objects through time without decay. Fire will melt
ice, but then the melted ice will put out the fire Fire”. Whats key to Wollen’s definition between the two is how they appropriate time. Still images have an ability to preserve the past “like flies in amber”. The quality of eternalising existence became a phenomenon as photography’s popularity grew. The ability to capture and preserve the true image of a subject or object was a process of great curiosity when it first became available. Preserving an image of oneself would have felt like a true work of mythology. Stemming from tales of the search of the fountain of youth, or themes of immortality and eternity that are embedded in various modern religions.
"To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt”. Susan Sontag, in her book On Photography, comments on how time is resisted once a photograph is made. As soon as a photograph is taken of oneself then that person will never again be that young. Look at that photograph the next day and you will see little difference, look at the photograph in ten years and you will see quite a change, look at it in fifty years and the person will become almost unrecognisable. When we think of photographs in this way we can only think of the mortality that we are all involved. A stillness that one day we all will share in death.
Taken from an essay I wrote last year on Stillness.