Justine Varga

The photograph is often considered a visual expression of a singular instant, an isolated representation of a moment in time so infinitesimal that mechanical capture is the only means of suspending it. Today, rapid photographic images proliferate exponentially, they are the currency with which we circulate our perspectives of the world: instantaneously taken, broadly disseminated.

Justine Varga subverts these commonly held beliefs. As she asks: ‘How can these works contest material, procedural and, ultimately, social expectations we take for granted?’ Her photographic objects persistently assert their physical materiality and the means by which they have come into being.

If we take for granted steps into this suspended instant, both inhabiting and exceeding the limits of photographic exposure. For this is a photograph made, not taken, a photograph which explicitly retains the process by which it came into being. Placed upon Varga’s studio desk lamp, this large-format negative became a site for the inscription of lived time, stretching the point of exposure over the course of a year. Operating as a refusal of both photographic representation and the urgency of the instantaneous moment, collapses the span of a year, marking an expanse of light and time upon a singular object.