PhotoForum Member Portfolio

June 2025

Torment in Time:

This photography project explores innovative ways of using a medium in constant evolution. The work looks beyond photography’s traditional forms and incorporates modern methods of reinterpreting time and space. This fascination with photographic technology has lead to projects investigating obsolete and antiquated processes.

The exhibition titled Torment in Time is one such example. It explores the work of Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne (Duchenne de Boulogne, 1806-1875). The images he produced during this period brought together three products of the time - electricity, physiology and photography. Although a doctor and involved with Parisian hospitals, Duchenne never practiced his profession. Fear, pain, joy, sorrow, were his interests. These and other expressions were all documented by the use of localized faradization (electrical current applied on the skin to stimulate facial muscles). The photographs were then printed and used not only by the medical profession but also the artistic community. His hope was to show a pure facial expression, devoid of soul, for artists to copy. His publication of Mecanisme de la physionomie humaine ou analyse electro-physiologique de l’expression des passions in 1862 was the first of its kind to use these three modern technologies. The images of “living anatomy” were used for research into certain muscular afflictions at the time and were significant to Darwin who later used them to illustrate expressions of men and animals.

It is Duchenne’s interest in educating artists through the capture of visual expressions that was the motivation for this exhibition. As a partial re-enactment it is hoped that these images show portraits that reveal a more soulful subject. Like all portraiture, the photographs in Torment in Time are a process of self-discovery, an investigation about being human. Visual statements of facial expression have over time changed from being documents of scientific data to images of beauty and idealized perfection. Somewhere along this timeline raw expressive mechanisms have been smothered or forgotten. Yesterday’s images of pure rage and intense fear are replaced by socially acceptable smiles and pouty facial gymnastics. The images displayed seek to question our reliance on past imagery and challenge our view on contemporary visual issues.

Contact: evilcretney@gmail.com

Clive Cretney