‘All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to times relentless melt.’[1](Sontag, 2002, p.15)

One Hour presents 3,600 portraits extracted from digitally archived photographs held by Hampshire Museums Service.  The photographs were taken of communities and individuals living in and around Havant, Winchester and Basingstoke between the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Inspired by the steady rhythm and time keeping of St. Faiths’s clock housed within The Spring Arts & Heritage Centre, each image denotes a second in time, accumulating here as one hour of experience constructed through the multiple identities that formed these local communities.  The accompanying film presents the images a second at a time, animating the static imagery seen on the walls and acting as a visual clock. 

In considering these images as both representations of individuals and as a collective whole, we are reminded of the expanse of human experience and our relationship with the past.  The original images are of social, military, business and familial groups and are taken from photographs documenting daily activities, celebrations, regional rituals, traditions and skills.  The source photographs capture moments deemed to be of value and significance, and record individuals and groups of people brought together within small and large local, regional and global events – from weddings and school photographs, to business outings or military exercises.  Each image reanimates the past and reinstates the individuals that populated these fragments of history within the present.

The uniform processing of the selected individuals, with each portrait equally sized and presented, responds equally to those who were the focus of attention as well as to those in the background or on the periphery of the original image. In some cases the facial features of the subject are barely discernable, yet the act of concentrating our gaze on these otherwise unnoticed individuals reanimates a sense of individuality, emotion and involvement in a common visual historiography. Each image is presented separately, with original groups now mixed within a larger whole, indicating the breadth of individual experiences that constitute communities.

The contemporary viewer responds to the hints of social hierarchy that remain within the extracted portraits.  Items such as hats, costumes and facial expressions begin to create individual narratives that the viewer embellishes or questions with the mixture of images simultaneously shifting our responses as we scan across genders, ages and apparent and imagined identities.

The digital interface allows miniscule detail to be extracted as, in Sontag’s words, ‘slices’ of fragmentary time. Each portrait preserves the unedited integrity of the original image, capturing blemishes, blurring and fading as intrinsic elements of the visual quality of the work. The digital interface accentuates colour values making what were monotone images into a rich and surprisingly colourful checkerboard of imagery.  Within the animated compilation of images each portrait lingers for one second in actual time, recording the past but seen in the present and presented as a tangible exhibited object in its own right.

One Hour plays on the curatorial practice of using archival photographs to contextualize examples of material culture within museums. Here the images and the subjects themselves become the object of consideration. They are the focus of our attention, involving the viewer in an empathetic relationship with each original individual, now reinstated within our own world of experience and awareness.

Acknowledgements:

One Hour has resulted from research supported by the University of Chichester and undertaken within the photographic archives of Hampshire Museums Service whose support and expertise is gratefully acknowledged.

The exhibition was dedicated to the life, art and achievement of Matthew Miller, 1961 – 2011.

All images by kind permission of Hampshire Museums Service.

Text © Shirley Chubb, 2025

 

[1] Sontag, S. On Photography, London: Penguin 2002