Chronos

Rating:
Summary: Photos stop time to show life's motion
Review: Catalan photographer Pere Formiguera's stunning Cronos isn't about sex. And it's a good thing, too, because otherwise this hefty photographic study might not have, as it has seemed to, flown under Western censors' radar screens.

Formiguera's repeated photographs of family and friends, many nude, chronicle his subjects in the same pose and setting over ten years-- showing, variously, the blooms of pubescence, adulthood, and the gentler transformations of middle and old age.

But on another level, sex is the only topic of this book, which contains exquisite images of the adolescent male, perhaps the human avatar of time's rupture. Birth, puberty, aging, and death are each and together fundamentally sexual: single-celled asexual creatures just divide, never growing, coming of age, declining, or really dying. Being sexual we are "clocks of meat," as poet Allen Ginsberg said famously. Like a strobe, Formiguera's magnificent photos stop the clock precisely to show life's motion.