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.

Irene Tsatsos


Irene Tsatsos lives and works in Kagel Canyon, California.
T. Antonakis Ruben Kane, Untitled (photograph of sky above Kagel Canyon, California), September 2005.


This picture is so obvious that it is hard to see, and not only because it appears here in black and white. It's easily overlooked because even in context on my computer screen it looks like a standard-issue screensaver, rather than what it is; an image of the sky above my house. It was taken on a clear day two-and-a-half years ago by my son, then five years old, shortly after we moved in. We live in a rural area, near but outside the city, in the Angeles National Forest. The sky here is intense, visible, confident as it rises above the mountains around us, above the muted haze of the Los Angeles basin. Anyone glancing at my screen would think it's the regular screensaver, but if you were to look carefully you would see the blue of this photograph has a richness that the flat blue of the screensaver lacks. When I see this image, which I do every single day as I sit in front of my computer, I do not see flat pixels. Through the eyes of my son, I see depth and tranquility. I see space and light.
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Micol Hebron