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.

Carrie Yury


Carrie Yury
Larry Sultan, Dad on Bed, 1985



On the phone, after arranging to meet him I asked Larry, “How will I know you?”

“Oh, you’ll know me,” he said.

Larry Sultan looked like his dad. Sultan struggles with the similarities between his own life and that of his parents in his book Pictures from Home. The book’s underlying theme: his parent’s mortality, and also his own, was sadly underscored last year with Sultan’s passing.

When I see this picture, I see not only Irving Sultan, but also Larry Sultan sitting there on the bed. These images make me think about my own mother and father, my relationship to them as they age, the shifting burden of responsibility, the way family personalities, dramas, dynamics, and narratives that seem so big in one historical moment become fragile and almost precious as time passes. My mother turns 70 today, and my father is 82.

“I want my parents to live forever,” Larry Sultan wrote in Pictures from Home.

Me too.
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Micol Hebron