Photographic time has greatly mutated since the advent of digital imagery. Both eternal and decisive moments seem to have been absorbed into a temporarily stationary stream of anticipated sound and movement. What many do not know is that the camera's ability to stop time began eroding as far back as the 1970’s.Marcus Schubert is well known for his photographs of Outsider Environments. Though it was his ambition to forever preserve these visionary and ephemeral installations, he has recently discovered that his images are not frozen in time.Apparently Schubert, who was extremely sensitive to sulphur dioxide was unable to use the premixed Kodak F5 Fixer to stabilize his images. Instead he concocted his own recipe of hyposulphite with no added gelatin hardeners. As a result, though the forms of his imagery were fixed in pictorial space, the emulsion was never hardened against the force of time.
Bodhan Litnansky, Le jardin du coquillage, France . Marcus Schubert, 1986, printed 2014
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