In this issue: close encounters

Light and shadow. Truth or fiction. Last week on an airplane from the west to the east coast, I read Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows. (1) With this exquisite meditation on the significance of Eadweard Muybridge's photographic time-and motion studies, I found myself delightfully resigned to my own time-and-motion experience. Passing through four times zones, the flight began in late morning and ended at midnight in New York. I felt robbed of time, yet also strangely exhilarated by a long day of travel. On the drive home from the airport, I experienced ethereal visions emanating from the hood of the car which I attributed to fatigue and oncoming headlights on a hot, hazy night.

Seeing is believing. Or as Mary Anne Staniszewski and others have suggested, believing is seeing. (2) With the emerging technology of the camera, both Muybridge and nineteenth-century "spirit photographers" catapulted observers into encounters with events and phenomena inaccessible to the human eye. Freezing motion or annealing vaporous or visceral presences, photographs both expanded and confounded credulity.

Mark Alice Durant and Jane Marsching organized a searching panel on the paranormal and photography for the College Art Association's 2002 Annual Conference. This served as the foundation for the intriguing thematic investigation they have developed for this issue. For Photography and the Paranormal, Durant and Marsching, with Alison Ferris, Louis Kaplan, and Karl Schoonover, explore the aesthetic tensions of the ordinary and uncanny in the first 150 years of photography. Starting with nineteenth-century spirit photography, they explore the complex alchemy between emerging technologies and inexplicable occurrences, between vision and visions. Photography's reported veracity was strategically undermined by its liaison with the immaterial and ethereal. The medium confirmed that the balance of seeing and believing, of observation and knowledge, remains an irresolutely complicated affair. I am deeply indebted to Mark, Jane, and their collaborators for creating a spirited, speculative, and entirely engaging exchange of ideas.

Questions of seeing, believing, and credulity are explored in all of the essays and projects in this issue. All of the work is about envisioned pasts and futures, the ways that images both confirm and undermine our understanding of the world. Moira Roth's luminous meditation on travel and memory with her fictitious companion, as well as Shimon Attie's haunting evocations from his Writing on the Wall, Berlin, project linger in our consciousness. Marco Maggi and Linda Weintraub's intricate labyrinth of diminishing lines and emerging language possesses the enduring incandescence of each infinitesimal stroke.

Searching, open-minded speculation characterizes all of the work. Affirmative and ambiguous, we are invited to critically examine our own fear of and fascination with the mysterious and irresolute. Vagary suggests ideas of journey or excursion, as well as a departure from the expected or logical order. Returning to my own musings on time and motion, I hope that you have time to travel with the lively minds and intriguing incalculables represented in this issue.

(1.) Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin, 2003).

(2.) Mary Anne Staniszewski, Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (New York: Penguin, 1995).

COPYRIGHT 2003 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group