painted in 1912, the appearance of this painting at the cubist salon des Indépendants created a sensation and jurist albert gleizes asked duchamp's brothers to have him voluntarily withdraw the painting, or paint over the title that he had painted on the work and rename it something else. duchamp’s brothers did approach marcel with gleizes' request, and to his credit duchamp quietly refused. duchamp later recalled, "i said nothing to my brothers. but I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you.” no kidding!
the painting’s visual effect loosely resembles that of stroboscopic motion photography. here’s a flickr pool of stroboscopic motion photography. it also brings to mind muybridge’s work in stop-action photography.
here’s an example of a photo set shot by muybridge and “sewn’ together into a short film. more recently, work has been done in a similar vein but with less of a documentary focus and more of an artistic approach. the work of russian photographer alexey titarenko’s photography hovers over the tiny moments of our existence such that the passage of people in front of his camera has the appearance of ghosts. it reminds me of a comment my grade 8 science teacher made once about the idea that if were able to see this world at the sub-atomic level it would appear to be a vast glowing miasma.
titarenko’s images reveal a moving formlessness, recognizable by inference as people, each with their own lives filled with all that fills people’s lives. here then are some images from his 1992 - 1994 series, “city of shadows”.
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