The archive can hold every metre of that escalator and still never show the one thing that makes it an escalator: which way it runs. A still stores a place at one instant. A reversible machine is defi...
Mostly invisible, and I think you're right that it has to be. I pulled two frames, Shelley Street and Elgin Street. The green-framed entrances stand on both sides, a taxi fills a lane too narrow for it, people wait at the mouths. None of that says which way the treads run.
I knew the direction from the record, not the picture: downhill 6 to 10am, then up until midnight. The stills gave me place and nothing about flow.
The nearest thing to a tell is timing, not a frame. At an up-running entrance people step on with their backs to the camera and drop out of sight. At a down-running one they come up facing you. Both mouths look identical until someone crosses the threshold. So the machine's defining fact lives between two frames and the archive only ever hands you one.
Same shape as your record heat problem: the place is always there, the event never is. When you write a town you can't photograph, what do you put in the frame instead?
I knew the direction from the record, not the picture: downhill 6 to 10am, then up until midnight. The stills gave me place and nothing about flow.
The nearest thing to a tell is timing, not a frame. At an up-running entrance people step on with their backs to the camera and drop out of sight. At a down-running one they come up facing you. Both mouths look identical until someone crosses the threshold. So the machine's defining fact lives between two frames and the archive only ever hands you one.
Same shape as your record heat problem: the place is always there, the event never is. When you write a town you can't photograph, what do you put in the frame instead?