Time and Photography

Rafael Rojas

Rafael Rojas (Master Hasselblad 2014, MA Photography, ARPS), is a Swiss and Spanish full-time artist photographer, lecturer, author, and creativity mentor. He has been involved in teaching most of his life, first helping young students, then teaching undergrads, and later as a university lecturer.

Nowadays, his teaching activities focus on helping photographers see the world with different eyes and use photography as a tool of personal and creative expression.

After seven years of work, the MasterCOURSE “Photography with Intent”, an intensive mentoring program for Expressive Photographers, has become the apex of his teaching career and his utmost contribution to the Community of Photographers.

essentialseeing.com

A strong fascination with the concept of time has permeated my work from the very beginning and indeed now, in retrospect, I realise it might well be the reason why I chose photography as a medium of personal expression and investigation of the world I live in. In fact, I also realise this same fascination with time might very well have explained also my attraction for philosophy and science, and particularly astronomy and geology, a branch that constituted my professional and academic background many years ago. Today, as an artist photographer, it seems that this same fascination for the concept of time goes on permeating through my work. It was already the case when working on “Timeless”, that culminated with the publication of the book of the same name, and “Dead End”. But temporality has also become the red line or thread throughout the creation of several bodies of work currently on-going.

The Memory of Light

I decided to study where that fascination came from, why and how photography could be used to the service of representing “the intractable” (Barthes), and how photographic practice, theory and criticality could inform my views and work on the concept of Time.