The stars stop moving, but the earth still turns

Marinai, 2012

Franco Marinai continues his epic program of deconstructing our ideas of time and its portrayal that he first showed us in March of this year with his groundbreaking work in color chrono-photography.  He is closing in on his goal of isolating the fixed point of time, its fulcrum.  By scaling back to a black-and-white representation, his current strategy, he is able to abstract motion and therefore time yet further, reducing it to what amounts to a spare, defining beauty of pure marks and markers.  It doesn’t help to know that underlying these are trivial or prosaic acts like walking, climbing steps, eating, biking.  Forget that he uses a medium format camera modified with the addition of a variable speed motor.  Forget even that he uses a camera at all.  These marks are gestures for both the unraveling of time, and for its concentration.  They are black holes, and like all black holes they command our acute attention.   

Marinai, 2012

Marinai, 2012

Marinai, 2012

Marinai, 2012

Franco is in the process of collecting these images, numbering almost 100, into a limited-edition book of photogravures for which he will undertake the monumental task of printing himself from copper plates in his Manhattan studio. It will be entitled The Motion of the Wheel and Other Spins.  Those interested may contact him directly at www.marinai.com for further details.

The chronophotographs of Franco Marinai

Marinai, 2011

When the cascades of color fall away - soon they will - these tendrils of red, blue, silver, ochre - you say to yourself: this is all about movement, but it is deafeningly still, there is no movement, it has ended or is about to begin but it is not here - and yet here it is, everywhere.

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Marinai, 2011

In the luminous pictures of Franco Marinai, we have stepped across a boundary of perception.  Instants of motion are deconstructed, splintered, laid out under the delta-t of our calculus.  These runners from the NYC Marathon of 2011 offer their bodies to a surrealist vision of malleable flesh, against freeze-frame streaks of background.  From these nightmare slices, it is for the viewer to intuit and recompose a human reality.  In an earlier period this would be a task for the gods, but times have changed.  There are newer truths.

Marinai, 2011

Franco's inspiration may be in his blood.  His city of Florence has produced others who have wrestled with making depictions of the kinetics of real life - Leonardo da Vinci is one who comes to mind.  Toward the end of the 19th century Etienne-Jules Marey invented the chronophotograph and coined the word for it; borrowing from him, Muybridge contributed his famous images of horses and runners.

Marey, Pelican, ca. 1882

But it was in Italy, home of Fiat and Ferrari, that ideas of speed and motion found their most fertile reception.  The futurist movement in art developed there, in the urgent, stacatto-filled works of Boccioni, Marinetti, Balla and others, drawing connections between perception and the new world of machinery.

Balla, 1913

 

Berkeley had said esse est percipi, everything is sense; the Italians taught us to practice it.  The confounding thing about time however - and this is the great paradox implicit in Franco's photography, made possible by his own technical prowess - is that when you chop it up into smaller and smaller bits, it seems to stand still.  Thus there is an immense quietude in his work, a beautiful calm that resides at the heart of motion.  He has discovered this.  It is not too much to think that Da Vinci would understand.

Technical note:  Franco works with a modified medium format Bronica SQ-A camera shooting Velvia Fujichrome film.  His website is www.marinai.com.