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.

Jacki Apple



Jacki Apple 
Visual, performance, and sound artist.
Shoji Ueda,1970s. 
I first saw Ueda’s work in an exhibition Japanese Photography: Today and Its Origins at the ICA in London in August 1979 and I bought the catalog. I believe Ueda’s works were originally shown in an exhibition called “Memories Without Sounds” in Tokyo in 1974, a phrase that stuck in the recesses of my consciousness.
This image and all of Ueda’s work brings to mind the novels of my favorite Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. It would be a mistake to confuse this image with the surreal, for it comes from a deeply Japanese sensibility. It suggests that the world is not as it appears, that the dimensions of reality are multifold, mysterious, and that existence itself is ephemeral. Unlike many photographs that convey a sense of time stopped and frozen, or of life in process, this image seems to exist dislocated from place and outside of time, but rather in the boundless space of memory and possibility. It is not presence that he captures, but an intangible absence, an ineffable stillness like an echo of silence. This image continues to resonate for me as much as the first time I saw it nearly 30 years ago, and it has inspired and influenced my work.
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Micol Hebron