Introduction

This site is a showcase for the photographic experiments of Paul Jeff who as PAUL+A, and in collaboration with featured artists, is attempting to re-invigorate photography as a time-based medium. Bored of the ‘spatial’ picture making that has thus far mainly defined photographic practice PAUL+A aim to develop a practice of ‘Performed Photography’.

The work on this site demonstrates an attempt to formulate a time-based conception of photography, in response to a particularly held perception that the ‘world as picture’ has been more or less exhausted. The alternative assertion here is that photography should be interpreted in its complex relations to the concept of event, rather than its reified and literal manifestation as picture.

This means shifting allegiance from the current spatialised system of representation that it resides within, and a quantitative philosophical framework as bequeathed by the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. In contrast to this status quo it is suggested that photography can utilise the dynamism, flow, mobility, and multiplicity of interpretation posited principally by three uniquely modern thinkers, Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Using what has been termed ‘new Bergsonism’ as a methodology, it is my assertion that through a re-alignment of its spatio-temporal constituencies to a more even degree, then photography, especially in its interpretive possibilities, can be re-invigorated with new potentialities.

Vital to the Paul+a project is Bergson’s credo of thinking in terms of time rather than space, and with the inception of a new temporalised medium there is a necessity to interrogate the legibility of photography as it resides in a new qualitative moment. The practice attempts to formulate both a compliment to the spatial ‘decisive moment’ of Cartier-Bresson, as well as a possible time-based practice based on the energising effects of performativity, and termed here ‘performed photography’.