The Mark of Time

The Mark of Time is a small photobook of images taken from frames of decomposing film, made by Éric Rondepierre and published in 2015 by Editions Bessard in a limited edition.

Rondepierre watches films in cinémathèques and private collections and picks out single frames damaged by age and storage, which he reproduces without retouching. In the presentation he wrote for the book he says he began the series in Washington in 1993 and exhibited it at MoMA in New York two years later. He looks for frames where the marks of decay and the picture are hard to tell apart. Bessard issued it as BeSpoke Collection No. 1, in an edition of 250 copies. The artist’s site lists it as 24 photographs on 25 pages with an English presentation, and Bessard says each copy includes a 15.3 x 18.5 cm C print signed by the artist.

Rondepierre was born in Orléans in 1950 and works in Paris. His site says he trained and worked as a professional actor in theater and dance, then began in the early 1990s to explore the blind spots of the cinema apparatus: frames that show for one twenty-fourth of a second and cannot be seen in normal projection, which he presents as large-format prints. He was an associate professor at the University of Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) from 1996 to 2015 and also writes fiction. His other 2015 books include Images secondes (Editions Loco), 225 pages with texts by Catherine Millet and Jacques Rancière.