Eight Seconds

"Eight Seconds"

from Saturday, November 14, 2026 to Saturday, January 16, 2027

Galerie XII Paris

The year 2026 will mark the 200th anniversary of the invention of photography. To celebrate this occasion, Galerie XII is delighted to present the work of artist Maciej Markowicz.

Markowicz photographs from inside a vehicle converted into a camera obscura. No film, no negative to enlarge from. Chromogenic paper exposed directly for eight seconds, producing a unique paper negative that cannot be reprinted, duplicated or repeated.
What the paper records is not an instant but a duration. For eight seconds the lens stays open over the Seine and the camera moves through the city — water, light, traffic and weather passing across the paper. Not a moment arrested, but a length of time held in a single object.

The bridges are those Gustave Le Gray and Édouard Baldus worked from in the 1850s, both painters before they were photographers. Baldus photographed Paris to hold its buildings before Haussmann took them down. Markowicz photographs the same crossings to hold something less solid: the eight seconds themselves.

For this exhibition Markowicz has fitted the gallery window onto the courtyard of the Village Saint-Paul with a lens.The courtyard appears live and inverted in the window itself — passers-by, light, weather, moving in real time.Visitors stand inside the instrument that made the works around them. On the walls, the same city held still for eight seconds; in the window, the same city continuously arriving and disappearing. The difference between the two is the subject of the exhibition.

The exhibition may hold one more image, which no one in the gallery will see. The Road to Vincennes — a single eight-second exposure held across eight sealed cassettes, sold closed and opened for the first time by whoever buys it — is in preparation, and would be shown on the far wall of the darkened room.