edinger shoots his subjects from the frontal perspective and uses backlighting and no flash to produce the subtle shadows and sculptured effect he desires. He can usually get the image he wants by the fourth or fifth shot using Polaroid Type 52, Type 53 or Type 55 instant film to "fix the moment" when his assemblages come together.

These assemblages are seen as works of art in themselves. "My friends sometimes tell me I should not be a photographer at all but a sculptor and that I'm always creating sculptures," he says. "But I am caught in my way of thinking and what I care most about is revealing aesthetic beauty through a photograph of high technical quality."

He frequently tones his images, a process that takes advantage of his painting skills when working with Polaroid positive prints. Medinger paints the fixing fluid on the print where he wants to retain tones that range from black to white. Where he omits the fixer, the silver oxidizes over time, creating a sepia tone. When he likes its color, Medinger then paints the entire print with the fixing agent to halt oxidation. And voila!—split tones.

Which brings us back to the question of time. Silver oxidizes, but what else in his work responds to the nonspatial continuum of irreversible events? Is he playing with time, violating it, suspending it when he counterpoises objects that have outgrown their usefulness with skulls and bones that, through his art, will forever endure its ravages?

"Time I can stop, but only for the matter of a second," he says. "I can fix the moment, and that is formally satisfying to me, but time itself is what I find in the object." So, in a sense, time lives for Medinger. It lives in the weathered dolls he discovered with his daughter at a flea market in Metz, in old tools scattered in a workbench drawer and, without fail, in his lasting photographs.

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Michel Medinger, who works in the Ministry of the Environment in Luxembourg, exhibits throughout Europe and the U.S., including recent shows at the International Forum, Tokyo; the Musée de l'Etat de la Ville de St. Petersbourg; Musée Ken Damy, Milano; Academia di Belle Arte, Bologna; Galerie Jean-Pierre Lambert, Paris and Galerie Clairefontaine, Luxembourg.