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.

Chas Bowie


Chas Bowie, Writer

Bill Thomas, Rats and Syringes, 1992.


In his suicide self-portraits of the 1990s, Bill Thomas offers himself willingly to Death, on the condition that the Reaper travel a humiliating road to meet him. The photographer calmly awaits the Horesemen in absurdly convoluted yet entirely functional deathtraps of his own creation.

Thomas cheats Death every time, of course, thanks to last-minute interceptions from the immortalizing power of photography. With a well-timed squeeze on his cable release, Thomas is captured by his camera, sequestered to a literally death-defying, eternal existence on photography's metaphysical plane of suspended animation.

In Rats and Syringes, Thomas acknowledges his pact with photography directly: when the rats on his lap find the cheese on their traps (inadvertent triple suicide!), two syringes filled with a common darkroom chemical, potassium ferricyanide, will plunge into his arms, killing the photographer instantly. Suicide a la Kodak.

But Thomas is again playing Lucy van Pelt to Death's Charlie Brown, here with a twist. Promising not to yank the football away this time, he even offers Death a special handicap: one of photography's own alchemical potions to use against him.

Eyes locked on its target, Death charges the ball.
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Micol Hebron