Often the limit of what is visible seems to be, as in this case, the limit of what photography is capable of, its zero degree. In a way these pictures by Stephan Tillmans are just documents of that conditionality, moments when the “image” is something hardly even seen. They are the artifacts of a process beyond the frame, imperceptible durations rendered tangible. Indeed, certain technologies have changed (and are changing) our perception of time, they extend or distort it, creating new divisions – its fractions become nearly infinite. Tillmans reveals something of what might happen in those transitional moments; structures with no interior, the medium has a shape and a logic all of its own. Made by photographing the few brief seconds of illumination just after a television has been switched off, we can clearly see the machine as imposing a set of values and not just as a portal, or the mute carrier of data. He uncovers a strange complexity in this seemingly passive surface. Of course his intentions are more formally complex, so there is also a rewarding play between the visual abstraction of the images and the fact that they have been produced by directly observational means. But as strategies of mass communication become ever more physically diffuse, and so more adept at concealing the mechanics that control the ways in which information is distributed, Tillmans’ work feels like an important (if perhaps somewhat oblique) reflection on the origins of that change.
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