Issue 109 | March 25 - April 8, 2022

I’m In A Time Zone

On Sunday, March 13, at 2 am the US entered into Daylight Saving Time, and the sunset jumped from 6:00 pm the night before to a far more reasonable 7:01 pm Sunday evening.

What nobler cause could there be then to save daylight that precious resource vital to so many photographers! I welcome that one-hour loss of sleep! As someone who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, the day we finally enter Daylight Saving Time really feels like the beginning of happier days ahead. It’s also the unofficial ‘Opening Day’ of my outdoor picture-making season.

So I awoke Sunday morning, cheered by the time change, and started going around the apartment fixing the time on some of our old-fashioned non-internet connected clocks; the clock radio, the clock on the stove, the old-fashioned kitchen clock, the clock on my digital camera (which actually has a daylight saving setting but I’m never sure if I’ve activated it).

The clock radio in our bathroom is 11 minutes fast. Why is my bathroom in its own time zone? I believe this special bathroom time zone was established as a way of helping to ensure we wouldn’t be late for events or appointments outside the house. And after living in this special time zone for a while, I have to say, it works. Moving to the kitchen, I noticed that clock was six minutes behind. I’m not sure, but this time zone may have been established to help ensure food was not undercooked. Or it could represent the battery dying. How many time zones does my house have, anyway? As many as Russia? Did you know Russia has 11 time zones? (As if we needed more evidence of their imperial overreach).

In the contiguous United States, we have four time zones, and in 2016 I took a cross-country road trip back and forth through them all. My buddy and I drove a long, inverted arc from NYC south through New Orleans before heading north through Albuquerque and Denver, west to LA, and finally up to Seattle. On our five-week-long trip, getting to Seattle ended up taking close to four weeks. The trip back was fast, and I remember racing through the time zones as we headed back to New York. I remember having the strange realization that as we drove we’d ‘spring forward’ in time by literally springing forward through space, as opposed to time. I also remember the beauty of the glow from the setting sun illuminating endless vistas outside Bozeman, Montona; light that lasted well past 10 pm before finally extinguishing into darkness. In New York, even on the longest days, the light from the setting sun doesn’t linger much past 9 pm.

Later light in New York City has a specific resonance for me - it means that people who finish up work at 5 or 6 have an hour or two after work to hang out, unwind, and appreciate late day sunshine with their friends. Life on the street grows busier, and it’s generally accompanied by relaxed, good vibes. As someone who enjoys making candid photographs out in the world, these after-work summer hours are some of my favorite times to make photos.

Photographers make most of their work in very specific, mostly fleeting time zones of their own. For candid street photographers, a shutter speed of 1/400th of a second is often referenced as a starting point - a fast enough fraction of a second to freeze motion and get a sharp enough photo of a moment. Fine art/fashion photographer Paolo Roversi made a lot of work in the 1/4 of a second to 1 second time zones, using the resulting blurry exposures to evoke emotional responses of beauty and ephemerality.

Photographic time zones are not always so transitory. Edward Weston, made his famous photo of a green pepper in 1927 using a 4-6 hour exposure of the vegetable according to Weston’s grandson, Kim. Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto suggests that fossils are like photographs made over multi-million year exposure times:

Fossil are the result of natural cataclysms. They are created when something vibrantly alive is instantaneously extinguished and entombed by an earthquake, landslide, subsea volcanic eruption, or meteor impact. The earth and ash heaped on top of the thing stamp out the impression of its shape like a carved seal; then, over the course of tens of hundreds of millions of years, that shape becomes embedded in sedimentary layers and turns to stone. When you split the strata, the layer on top is the negative image, while the fossilized life form appears as the positive image. [via]

Recently there was a viral article in The Cut about surviving the coming vibe shift. The idea is that in the culture, things change, and some ways of being in the cultural moment feel dated if they persist past one of these vibe shifts. It was a fun kind of meaningless article that wasn’t really saying much more than things that seem cool in one moment, and uncool the next. What I got out of the article was an acknowledgment that shifts between time zones are never as sharp as we imagine. There’s always plenty of people that keep the old vibe long after the new vibe hits. Both the good old days and the bad old days are very much a part of our current days.

In general, I love the amorphous boundaries of time zones that The Cut article seemed nervous about. I love that any day I walk the streets of NYC, I can see young people rocking 1980s looks, folks driving 1970s muscle cars, or enjoying cafe life in urban neighborhoods still crowded with 19th-century buildings. I’m very attracted to these time zone anomalies as a photographer and when I see evidence of past eras in our present moment, I always grab a picture. It feels like I’m catching time travelers.

It’s getting late, so in the hopes of surviving the vibe shift that occurred over the course of time it took me to write this note, I’ll say goodbye.

Thanks for reading and I hope you all find the time you need to make pictures in the weeks ahead!

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Publisher's note: From this issue forward, the newsletter will be published bi-weekly (once every two weeks) through May 27. Over the summer, we'll aim for shorter issues once a month and then return to full issues on a bi-weekly schedule in the fall.

A note about Instagram: Instagram recently added a couple of new ways to view your Instagram feed: Following and Favorites. Following shows a chronological feed of folks you follow, and Favorites (you can have 50) shows you a chronological feed of your favorites. (You'll see the standard algorithmic feed if you haven’t selected one of these options). If you follow us on Instagram and want to make sure you're seeing the photo talks and events we’re posting before they happen, consider adding @nycphotocommunity to your favorites list.

peace and love,

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 109 | March 25 - April 8

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR. Photographer Nick Turpin suggested hiring these Ukrainian photo editors for postproduction services on your photos if you have the need.