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.

Ciara Ennis


Ciara Ennis, Curator
Photo: Untitled (A-Line), 2002, by Adam McEwen


Courtesy of the artist and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery


The appropriation by Adam EcEwen of this infamous war photograph makes for one of the most exhilarating images I have seen in some time. The 1945 photo documents the execution and subsequent hanging of Benito Mussolini and lover Clara Petacci in front of a gas station in a small Milan square. Cropped and enlarged to outsized proportions, the image, turned on its head, presents a radically different read from the original, transformed from brutal public hanging into a delirious private moment. When I view this work two competing narratives fight for dominance. The first is the fulfillment of a lover's suicide pact, which suggests the couple jumping to their deaths in an instant of willful abandon; the other presents a couple of bloodied angels soaring high in the sky, their rapturous spectral gaze fixed firmly on a heavenly prize.
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Micol Hebron