see the video.

This project started with a picture taken April 4, 2013 and continued for over 10 years. It started by accident. Like so many other things, serendipity stepped in, and shone light on a course otherwise hidden in the shadows.

What attracted my attention was a still image of a frozen instant randomly plucked from a stream of live motion.

Such an image is different than one taken with a still camera, if not only because the one taken with a camera is conceived in the mind of the photographer. It is the result of explicit physical action: pressing the shutter. The photographer picks the moment to selectively isolate in an image¹. From a stream however, each frame is a candidate, no one has priority over the other.

Some argue that the moving picture is more reflective of real life, while the still photograph is an abstraction, an instant frozen in time². Following from this point, the photograph is said to be a more cerebral experience as it allows one time to examine and reflect on a specific moment, to look at the details that otherwise skip by when experiencing life.

Submerged in the stream of 24 frames per second, it was imperceptible. It was also an unintended view; an expression completely tangential to the context, one suggesting a contemplation of something warm and pleasant; a warm bath perhaps, rather than the political discourse underway. It is the lack of intentionality, it is the ability to select one from the stream that exposes something unpredicted, something that could be completely unintended yet has the possibility to say more than anticipated³.

As the project continued, it moved from freezing fleeting expressions to freezing the frames for examination of the details and all that was going on inside the frame, in the quickly, and usually unnoticed, flowing river of time.

I started to see the ironic and humorous, otherwise hidden. A man holding a poster making claims of foreign allegiances, another an advertisement or an expression that clearly expressed what many of us might have been thinking.

Does a still extracted from the stream tell a different reality or does it provide nuance or does it suggest the multiple layers of reality?

What it does do is it takes away the intentionality of the shot. When you snap the shot, you capture an instant in time and what you get may be very different than what you thought you would get.

---

1. “Photography has always had its own complex engagement with time and movement. Think of the decisive moment.” [p.18, 2] ↩︎
2. “Photography as a tool to freeze and capture what cannot be seen; cinema simple captures what can be seen.” [p.22, 3]  “As the cinematic experience is so ephemeral, it has always been difficult to hold on to its precious moments…” [p.151, 2] ↩︎
3. photographs themselves are often contrived and staged; is this true for a single image extracted out of the stream? The stream itself might be staged, but individual images are one step removed [1]. This plays on the complex relationship between the photographic image and truth ↩︎

---

References:

[1] Guy Lane. 2007. Book Review STILLNESS AND TIME: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE MOVING IMAGE, Edited by David Green and Joanna Lowry. Journal Compilation, Volume 14, Issue 3 August 2007

• unlike the still image, a snapshot, portrait, etc. a still extracted from the stream of movie going pictures is unrehearsed, lacks the same artifice (assuming the moving picture is “real”)
• most still images are contrived, either through set up or posture by the subject, an image extracted from the stream of movie going pictures is unrehearsed, lacks the same artifice.  (assuming the moving picture is “real”)

[2] Green, David; Lowry, Joanna (eds.) – Stillness and Time. Photography and the Moving Image

• By stopping the “stream” we stop time. [so we can look at it and look at the details]
• Since the freeze-frame is actual stasis, and not merely its representation, its appearance on the screen is a moment of hiatus, not only in the temporal momentum of the film’s narrative bul also, potentially in the illusion of reality to which it is bound. The freeze-frame, argues Stewart, allows the possibility of cinematic reflexivity; although interestingly this is achieved through something that might be deemed not to belong to the medium of film and one that may take us outside of the film. p.19
• When we watch television, we have the impression that something is happening only once: this is not going to happen again, we think, it is ‘living, ‘live, realtime, where as we also know, on the other hand, it is being produced by the strongest, the most sophisticated repetition machines.” p.25 [and moreover, we have recorders that can stop the stream, save it, replay it, …]
• As the cinematic experience is so ephemeral, it has always been difficult to hold on to its precious moments, images and most particularly, its idols. In response to this problem, the film industry produced, from the very earliest moments of fandom, a panoply of still images that could supplement the movie itself: production stills, posters, and above all, pin-ups. p.151

[3] Campany, David. 2012. Photography and Cinema. Reaktion Press, London.

• Photography has always had its own complex engagement with time and movement. Think of the decisive moment. P.18 [in other words, how do you see a decisive moment in a film? or in a captured still one can find and then highlight the decisive moment] …. Photography provides visual clarity and narrative stillness p.19
• Photography as a tool to freeze and capture what cannot be seen; cinema simple captures what can be seen. P.22

[4] Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, Larry Fink

• The observation of the “Angel” tattoo highlights the power of co-incidence in the image; or as Barthes might say “punctum”

---

Content:

---

Blog Posts: