What happens when photography, long understood in Western visual culture as a medium for capturing the fleeting present, instead reveals that the present might not exist at all? Danger Soft Mud is a conceptual project built upon this paradox. Over a full year, every morning at precisely 7:30 am, I photographed the same warning sign on the beach at Portishead, near Bristol. The sign, bearing the words Danger Soft Mud, holds both literal and metaphorical weight: while it warns of the physical instability of the terrain, it also gestures toward the instability of time itself—fluid, amorphous, in constant motion. In contrast, the sign stands immobile, a fixed point against the ever-changing rhythms of the sea and sky. This tension between fixity and flux forms the philosophical core of the work. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, the project can be read through his threefold mimesis model. Mimesis I refers to the pre-understanding of the world—the sign and its location become the ritual’s point of departure. Mimesis II structures the 365 photographs into a temporal sequence, a constructed narrative. Finally, Mimesis III resides in the viewer’s reception: meaning arises not from individual images, but from their interrelations and the narrative reconstituted in the mind. In this way, Danger Soft Mud is not a record of a single moment, but a durational unfolding in which the present constantly slips away. Repetition, seemingly a redundant act, here becomes the space of difference. As Gilles Deleuze argued in Difference and Repetition, repetition is never mere replication—it generates variation. Each image captures new atmospheric conditions: changing light, shifting tides, fog, rain, golden sunlight, or monochrome drizzle. While the sign remains fixed, the world around it transforms. This very contrast makes time visible. The slideshow version of the series plays each image at one-second intervals, accompanied by the mechanical ticking of an analogue clock. This sound is not simply a backdrop—it performs time. The viewer is drawn into a parallel temporality, a ritualized past rendered momentarily present through rhythm and repetition. The act of photographing became a personal ritual: a daily encounter between body and landscape. The wind, rain, frost, or early morning mist were not merely technical challenges but physical reminders of time’s embodiment. While the sign never changed, I did, tired, soaked, curious, distracted. These embodied experiences became an invisible layer over the photographs, a kind of interphotographic temporality embedded in the work. Ultimately, the project’s essence lies not in a single image but in the relations between them. Each photograph is not a self-contained index of presence but a node within a temporal arc. The meaning unfolds between the images, in the differences, in what is not seen but inferred. In this way, Danger Soft Mud becomes an ontological statement: the present does not exist—only the residue of past images and the narrative reconstructed by the viewer’s perception. This is not merely a documentation of a sign, but a conceptual exploration of how photography—often assumed to preserve the present—might instead reveal its absence. The sign remains, the mud shifts, and we, as image-makers and viewers, are left with only the patterns of change and the stories we form from what is already gone.
Published here
Geza Csosz