Dimensions: image: 598 x 803 mm support: 792 x 997 mm plate: 605 x 807 mm
Copyright: © John Latham Estate, courtesy Lisson Gallery, London | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Editor: Here we have John Latham's "Flat Time I-IO", a print of stacked and splayed papers, seemingly suspended. It feels so still, almost frozen. What do you make of it? Curator: It's funny you say frozen. To me, it feels like time made visible. Latham was obsessed with challenging our linear perception of time. Can you see how the papers both stack up—a sort of chronological accumulation—and also splay out, defying that order? Editor: I see what you mean. The vertical stack implies a sequence, but the horizontal spread disrupts that. Curator: Exactly! It’s like he's saying time isn't just a straight line. It’s got depth, texture, even a little chaos. Editor: So, it's not just a picture of paper, but a picture of an idea about time? Curator: Precisely! It’s a clever visual metaphor. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Editor: It does! I'll never look at a stack of paper the same way again.
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http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/latham-flat-time-i-io-p79066
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This is one of a suite of etchings, entitled 5 photo etchings, that Latham produced in collaboration with artHester Editions. The suite of prints refers to two groups of works. The first four images – Tadpole-Taffrail (Tate P79062), Boy-Girl (P79063), Ben (P79064) and Presumed Level of Abstraction (P79065) – derive from Review of a Dictionary, a long-term project that Latham began in the mid-sixties. For this project, Latham photographed illustrated pages from a dictionary and other text books, and subjected the photographs to various experiments in the dark-room.
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