ooking at his photographs, one suspects that Michel Medinger has time on his mind. Time, for most of us, is something we experience in various ways but visualize only by what it has touched—a wrinkled face, a decaying tree. What is time after all?

A lifetime is an interval marked by the occurrence of a birth; Medinger's occurred in 1941 in Luxembourg. The international recognition he would receive later for his remarkable photographs came first to him as a 23-year old sprinter who was quick enough to compete in the 800 meter timed event in Tokyo's 1964 Olympic games.

Running fast, Medinger was simply following in family footsteps, for his father had competed in the Olympics in Berlin the year Jesse Owens took the 100 meter. It was also his father, a painter, who led him to art.

In Medinger's earliest photographs, sports pictures naturally enough, he isolated rare moments that reflected the extreme reach of movement. He brought creativity and imagination to his photojournalism. Gradually however, his focus shifted from heroic feats to the faded material of transient time. In the flaking facades of old houses and petrol pumps, Medinger began to find new expression. Trained as both painter and photographer, he explored form and color in peeling landscapes and captured the spirit of the countryside.

But by the mid-80s, his aesthetic interest drew him from the subject of landscapes toward telescoped vistas of startling constructions in black and white. No longer content to discover an image through his viewfinder, he began to create compositions in which he juxtaposed obsolete articles of the industrial age with the decomposing debris of the natural world. These are the photographs for which he is famous; pictures of curious things he has found and arranged for effect in boxes and frames.