TIME TIME TIME

Does anybody really know what time it is?

Photo by Bruce Barone

Photo by Bruce Barone

 

Photo by Bruce Barone

"Bruce Barone’s photographs are among other things annals of a former world, one which was documented so fleetingly and obscurely that I sometimes have felt as if it existed only in my imagination. More than once I’ve needed visual evidence of that world and could not lay my hands on any. It seemed to have disappeared, that time that now seems notional even when you are confronted with hard evidence of its existence. It was one of those points of overlap, a purgatorial era--stuck between past and future, between living and dead--a time-slip. American cities in the 1970s and early 1980s were restless ghosts, unable to believe they were no longer alive. They trailed their bricks and stamped tin and terra cotta like winding sheets. They were so dead that for a while it almost seemed as if the poor had been put in charge.

            "Barone, unlike many photographers of the time, was not trying to make pictures of what he wished existed, or of what happened in protected spaces behind closed doors, but recorded what actually transpired when he walked down the street, in Midtown Manhattan or in Hoboken. Midtown meant the greater Times Square, of course, and at that time it consisted of dollops of hustle and danger ladled out here and there along a plateau of inertia. It was on the nod much of the time, but could wake up angry. The setting was the ruins of the entertainment capital and nerve center of the Western world, circa 1905-1930. That era’s taste for filigree lent to every glassine-envelope transaction the flavor of those eighteenth-century prints in which ragged vagabonds are shown tending fires in the shadow of Roman colonnades. No one worried about the end of the world; that had already taken place........"

~Luc Sante

What are your thoughts on time?  I would love to hear from you!

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