Twenty-Six Seconds, 2024

The twenty-six-second long 8mm color film shot by Abraham Zapruder, which unexpectedly captured the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, is possibly history’s most studied film.

Daignault analyzes the “Zapruder film” further by painting each of its 486 frames, prying apart the ways in which photographic images shape the collective memory and understanding of this national trauma. That this event was caught on a home movie camera speaks not only to photorealism’s preoccupation with the cultural transformation inaugurated by mass-market cameras but also to the continued role of citizen-journalists recording police brutality, mass shootings, and military conflict on smartphones. By abstracting the film into a series of almost unreadable, loosely painted canvases, Daignault renders an exceedingly well-known piece of history strange and therefore viewable anew in our era of permacrisis.