The spark is the instant of fire, just as the instant is the shortest shard of duration: it has no duration, and the moment we perceive it, it has already vanished. Photography tries to seize it, yet in the New Year’s Eve fireworks a spark is never alone: it is a tide of instants, a proliferation of flashes too swift to be grasped, which a single image compresses into a single moment. This is where vertigo comes from: our inability to define the duration of time. The instant scatters, multiplies, dissolves the very moment it appears. Photography embodies this impossibility, turning the infinity of sparks into a kinetic confusion, right up to the edge of dizziness. What the eye receives as a flow, the image fixes in a paradox: a time too vast to be an instant, too short to be a duration.Napex 25311

Sylvain Bellenger