A Brief History of the "1 Image 1 Minute" Project

This project is a contemporary recreation of Une Image Pour Une Minute, a project originally produced by French director Agnes Varda for presentation on French television in 1983. In Varda's version, a photographic image appeared on television (in-between network programming), and someone--a curator, photographer, or art historian--would speak about the image for one minute.


Here I have asked contemporary photographers, artists, historians, and others to select an image that has significance for them, and write or speak about it for the equivalent of 1 minute. The result is a a compelling and accessible means of gaining insight into other artists’ and photographers’ perspectives. The project is also a way of reactivating photo history, cultural literacy, and of offering a closer look at images than the mere fraction of a second that most contemporary images are afforded.

Bartholomew Cooke


Bartholomew Cooke
Photographer

Flip Schulke, Hurricane Carla in Texas, 1961

Beyond the aesthetic appeal, I find this image interesting because of its paradoxical quality. In some ways it is a calm image, with its steadfast concrete anchor on the left and the ridged verticals of the light post and stoplight. The storm itself appears only as a nebulous white fog. Yet chaos is also present in the mass of lumber sprawled across the road by the violence of the storm. This wreckage contains a dichotomy of its own. While visually a complex jumble, the heap of lumber also symbolizes the power of the hurricane to obliterate, level, simplify; the storm has separated a structure into the most basic elements of its construction. The hurricane has also reduced the only person in the scene to an elemental state of being. Standing alone amongst the vestiges of a civilization rendered irrelevant and impotent by the storm, he succumbs to the basic emotions of fear and despair.
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Micol Hebron