Photographing the ephemeral.

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Eliot Porter made photographs of things that seem still, like beauty in the natural environment, but he said, "Never put off taking the picture ... nothing is permanent. Everything is changing." Photographers are intrigued by time. They are fascinated that they can "freeze" an instant of fleeting time with the click of a camera. They sometimes show us things we cannot see with our ordinary eyes. In the early days of photography, Eadweard Muybridge made thousands of sequences of photographs of people and animals as they moved so that we can actually see, for example, how a horse's legs move when it gallops. Harold Edgerton was a scientist who made photographs of even faster moving things that the unaided eye could not see, such as bullets flying through the air. Photographers know that the world is in motion and that everything changes from second to second, moment to moment, day to day, season to season, and year to year.

Tony Mendoza is a contemporary photographer interested in the temporal. He bought his first camera when he was eleven and has been taking pictures ever since. He shows his photographs in books and art museums. He makes photographs of subjects that are close to his life: his family, including himself, his pets, and flowers in his backyard. He likes to tell stories with his photographs and often uses words with his pictures.

One story took him ten years to make, but he only worked on it one day each year--Halloween. The story is about his daughter, Lydia, and her Halloween costumes. It began when she was three and it ended when she turned twelve and wanted to go to parties with her friends rather than dress up for trick-or-treating. Her father recalls that Lydia always had clear ideas of whom she wanted to be on Halloween, based on something she had read or a movie she had seen. Her mother sewed her costumes. On Halloween nights, in their living room, her father set up his camera, lighting, and a dark background. He took many pictures of Lydia, trying to get "just the right moment" as she played her character. Then he saved the ones he thought were best.

When Lydia was Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, she was nine years old, and when she was Audrey Hepburn, a famous actress, she was eleven. Lydia will never again be nine or eleven. However, due to the invention of photography, she and her parents can relive their Halloween memories through these pictures. Although she is now an adult, we can see a young girl as she was on Halloween in 1998 and 2000. We have permanent views of the ways she was in those fractions of seconds when her father clicked his camera years ago. We have time to look at the details of her costumes. We can notice how she changed in two years. We can study her expressions and wonder what she was thinking when she posed as Cleopatra and as Audrey Hepburn.

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For more on Eadweard Muybridge see the National Museum of American History, Freeze Frame: Eadweard Muybridge's Photography in Motion: http://americanhistory.si.edu/muybridge/index.htm

For more on Harold Edgerton see MIT Museum, Flashes of Inspiration: http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibits/flashinsp.html

For more on Eliot Porter see the Amon Carter Museum, Eliot Porter: The Color of Nature: http://www.cartermuseum.org/edu_guides/porter/index,htm

For more on Tony Mendoza go to: http://www,tonymendozaphoto.com/

Terry Barrett, Ph. D.

Terry Barrett is a Professor of Art Education at The Ohio State University. He teaches people who want to become art teachers, and he writes books about art for college students, http://arted.osu.edu/personnel/barrett.php