In Other Words

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This is a project about time. It is about the passing of time, about what it is, and about where it goes when we say time “passes”. This project does not pretend to give a fully overarching thesis on this immense subject. However, through its story, it opens a perspective that encompasses everything that is necessary for the viewer to begin to fully feel the subject. The story is told through a photographic narrative which progresses circularly, always retouching on the same points, like time, and like life and death.

The main story is that of a person suffering from terminal cancer, making this person confront the notion of time, the entropy implied by it, and its irreversible nature. But this story is also composed by multiple other layers, stacked one upon each other like a pile of cards, each touching on different viewpoints.

It touches not only upon this person, but also on some of the persons that surround him, as time passes them by as well, some of them knowing meaning of its passing while others are still learning of it. At a yet deeper level, this story touches upon not only these persons, but also on the spaces and territory within which they live. A space where some are born and some die, where some have come to leave their past behind and others have come to create a future that one day they may decide to leave behind as their past.

Deeper still, the story is told through the symbology that is found within this space, through the situations and objects that are found semi-randomly within it, within the synchronicity of things. Perhaps, at its deepest level, this story is about the author of it—that is, myself—son of the main character depicted in terminal condition.

In some way, the story even touches upon photography itself, briefly eulogizing the very medium through which it is told and with which it is conserved against the irreversibility of time.

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Words are not always effective. They are, at best, an approximation of the feelings we wish to express. We use words, but tend to get lost within them, never returning exactly to what we felt when we started.

There is a law in Physics that describes the tendency of things to get lost. The tendency for everything to get more disorganized over time. In its most basic form, the law looks like this:

∆S≥0.

In other words, the change in S over time is always greater than or equal to zero.

This is sometimes known as the law of Entropy. It has a close relationship to the concept of time—it is the only law in all of fundamental physics that that implicates that time flows forward; the only law that knows any difference between the past and the future. All other laws are reversible, meaning that time can flow in any direction without violating these laws. Entropy establishes that the past is what has passed and comes before the future, which is what has not yet passed. Meanwhile, entropy keeps increasing: at all levels things grow further away, the pathways we knew get more and more lost, the strings that connect things become tangled, and disorder persistently increases. This, is the passing of time.

In Other Words is currently expressed as a 70-page softcover book dummy, 200 X 240 mm in size, with 44 color plates ink jet printed onto Munken Lynx 120g paper.