In Photography, cinema, memory : the crystal image of time Damian Sutton says that photography’s history has been one in which subjectivity has been excluded from the internal mechanism of the camera. First the drawing implement and then photographic cameras operated as a lens or mechanism through which the world could be viewed, subjectivity hidden behind the laws of optics and chemistry.

What was forgotten was photography’s ability to depict time as a passing. The photograph is often considered timeless, negating time or simply poor in comparison to cinema--eg., photography “embalms time” itself. What we have forgotten is a different experience of time altogether, one that is very different from chronological time and that can be considered only in terms of pure duration