Some days ago, it came to my mind the idea of the photographer as someone who doesn't portray the present as she or he doesn't live there at all (in the moment she takes a picture). I know that much has been written on photography and memory (and one of the best books I have ever read on this theme is Susan Sontag's "Regarding the Pain of Others"), but what I'm trying to underline here is the kind of presence the photographer plays during the act of taking a picture.
In that moment, you are living the present as it were a memory. You think that the moment you are living is so important (in the negative or positive sense) that you have to "own" a memento of it. In the act of taking a picture, you have a glimpse of your future self. You are trying to understand what kind of image you will like to remember.
This shift in time in the photographer's mind is something that is really fascinating for me. You are not in the present because you are trying to meet the tastes of your future's self, you are trying to portray what you will be pleased or able to remember in the future. So, this act of "portraying the present" is, in fact, the act of portraying "the past in the future". It sounds strange as this makes me recall grammar and verbs and tenses and the idea of "future in the past" and this is the exact reversal of that idea.
A picture is a moment in time that I would call "past in the future" and that is something different from what we usually call "present".
I don't know, maybe this is the closest we got to a time machine.
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