Time

Sharon. Surrey Hills, Sydney. (Palm Project)

St Augustine said about time: “What is time? If you don’t ask me, I know; but if you ask me, I don’t know”.

 At the end of the 4th century and way ahead of his time, this theologian and philosopher went on to elaborate on ideas about subjective time as it co-exists through three essential categories: “time present of things past, or memory; time present of things present, or direct experience; time present of future things, or expectation.”

Altogether, it’s almost a formula for making a photographic image: Every shutter click distills a kind of truth told in that moment, as it has been before and will be again, but never in quite the same way. The difference, which St Augustine would appreciate if he was around now, is that we can hold a photograph up like a mirror to the present at the same time it represents the past.

This is the idea we aimed for in the Palm Project, a program devised for Oasis, using photography as a subtle path towards self-reflection.