ABSTRACT
What does it mean to expose—and what does it mean to be exposed in visual arts? This question has long suffered from a double bias: (a) a preference given to the issue of exposition space, to the detriment of exposition time; and (b) an excessive focus on the intentional act of exposing—the “will-to-show.” This chapter proceeds in three steps. The first section introduces very broadly the issue of what it means to expose today, in the context of globalization of art, and the homogenization and immunization of the gazes through the dispositive of “showtime.” Some artistic strategies are discussed which aim at displacing the spectatorial experience by using time as an ally. On this backdrop, the second section discusses whether there are general structures of temporality that can be elicited for visual arts, and the suggestion is made to distinguish between the “time of showing” and “shown time.” This distinction is then applied to photography and certain photographic practices which push these parameters to the extreme. At the same time, photography also requires us to take a third dimension of time into account, “exposure time,” which, as the early history of photochemistry proves, largely evades the “will-to-show.” In the third section, this feature is analyzed through a specific case study, that of the “exposure journalism’ pioneer, the Danish-American photographer Jacob A. Riis. While Riis is known for having introduced the flashlight into social photography, allowing to document realities that until then remained largely invisible, this over-exposure of the under-exposed also represented a form of violence. Returning to Riis’ original plates means to re-trace certain exposure events that were subsequently occluded or framed out because they did not fit into what they were supposed to convey. As it happens, exposure time resists its full translation into showtime.
