Timelapsed & Still
 
 

The Art and Writing of Jim Burlingame

Collage #17 - (Tight).JPG
 

What falls through the cracks and what remains: Where those two overlap, that's my turf.

Beginning in the late 1990s, I produced a sporadic zine of my photographs called "Timelapsed & Still." Two issues featured shots of Olympia street life and cultural events, from parties and rock shows to the local film festival and Procession of the Species parade. Another was entirely Polaroids of people and places, with an emphasis on the blurring and color distortion particular to that camera that is so evocative of the passage of time. The fourth issue chronicled a couple months of once-a-week shots of the Capitol Theater's graffiti wall. I began a project that was going to be a fifth, but it became so large that I turned it into the book Building Ghosts: A Month of Empty Commercial Properties in a Capital City, and the History that Haunts Them.

The title "Timelapsed & Still" lives on, here, with this site, since it perfectly captures a theme that runs through both my visual and literary art: The paradox that life in its myriad parts is so fleeting that much is lost to us, while at the same time particular pieces, either of our experiences or the world, seem indelible, unshakable and inscrutable, like scars or altars or something inbetween. "Everything is Elusive" is the name I gave to a mix tape years ago, and that feeling-as-a-philosophy could well have the corollary "In pursuit, we give form to what couldn't be glimpsed otherwise." Or, as I wrote at the end of one of my photo zines, "What is gold and good is so because it aches."