End(ur)ing Photography

Abstract

As recent studies tend to note, the convergence of photography and cinema onto a shared digital platform has caused these media to shed some, if not all, of their specificity. Little thought has been given, in this context, to the way in which photography may be turning cinematic because of a shift toward the durational in the conditions of its experience. For, as a consequence of being most often consumed off a screen, the photograph is increasingly experienced as an image that, not unlike cinema, has duration and, indeed, ends. The present article considers what can be described as a “cinematization” of photography in contemporary viewing habits, and outlines a critical historical context for these changes in the slide projections and films of photographs of 1960s and 1970s visual art.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the British Academy for funding my post-doctoral research project from which this article arises; the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their constructive comments; Fiona Tan and the Frith Street Gallery, Michael Snow, Paige Sarlin and Lux, London for kindly providing images of their works and permission to reproduce them here.

Notes

1 In fact, in the context of a book primarily on cinema, her formulation is as follows: “Unlike the photograph, cinema cannot but come to an end”.

2 Of course, even a printed photograph has “duration” and “ends” as, just like celluloid film, and even digital files, prints are subject to damage and decay. However, I am concerned here with “duration” that can more ordinarily or feasibly be experienced.

3 In fact, even the impalpable — if not, as some argue, the immaterial — status of a photograph on screen is being reconfigured by the diffusion of touch screens and the kind of “access” they grant to the image.

4 Burgin raises this question in an essay on the puzzling closing sequence of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse (1962), a protracted series of shots revisiting some of the places where the protagonists' love affair unfolded, but without any of the actors, dialogue, or other commentary. To Burgin, these shots feel like a series of photographs, and it is in relation to them, rather than contemporary screen photographs, that he wonders about the duration of the photograph.

5 Countenance is directly inspired by photography — August Sander's famous, though never completed, late 1920s taxonomy of German citizens. Yet, Tan's re-elaboration makes the portraits durational as, not unlike in Andy Warhol's 1960s Screen Tests, her sitters, though asked to pose still, were filmed with a (16 mm) movie camera for about half a minute or so (see Godfrey; Lowry).

6 In fact, there are different versions of this monologue as its language and performer change according to the country in which The Changeling is installed. For more information and for a (partial) installation view, see http://www.fionatan.nl/works/11 (accessed 29 Sept. 2010).

7 “Remediation” is, of course, the often-cited concept Bolter and Grusin elaborated from Marshall McLuhan.

8 In fact, at a Q&A after a screening of the documentary I attended at Anthology Film Archives in New York in March 2007, a member of the audience remembered the fascination that such dazzling “business presentations”, to which he would occasionally be taken by his father, had on him as a young child. For more on Paige Sarlin's The Last Slide Projector (2006), see http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/392686/The-Last-Slide-Projector/overview (accessed 13 Oct. 2010).

9 On “de-skilling” see Burn (esp. 394–96).

10 It may be worth pointing out here that, for Fried in “Art and Objecthood”, the “duration” of the art practices he attacks engenders a sense of persistence and even endlessness. Yet this is a sense of endlessness specifically tied to (and indeed, arising from) the experiential and the concrete, not the absolute or abstract: for, in one of Fried's oft-quoted expressions, such art is “endless the way a road might be: if it were circular, for example” (144).

11 In fact, to a certain extent a photo-essay in a magazine is “durational” too, since, as Graham himself remarked, magazines have a running time of sorts, in that they're only current until the subsequent issue (see Simpson and Iles 121–23).

12 For a fuller description of this lesser-known work, of which in fact there are two versions, see National Gallery of Canada (25–26) and Roberts and Steeds (69). For more on Snow's slide projection works see also Kunz; and Shedden (202). The cinematic and durational manifestation of the photographic image on slide is also played out in A Casing Shelved (1970), where, in fact, a single slide is presented as a film, in a cinema setting, for the duration of 45 mins and with an audio commentary.

13 One Second does not provide contextual information for the pictures; however, accounts of the film routinely explain that they were allegedly sent to Snow and other Canadian artists as images of possible sites for a monument (see e.g. Cornwell 1–3).

14 Frampton also apparently screened (nostalgia) with his own live commentary when the film was still work-in-progress (Haller 91).

15 In fact, there are thirty-one pictures in the film.

16 A contrast of this kind also emerges in Blow-Up. The rapidity with which Thomas (the photographer) takes his pictures of a seemingly flirting couple in a park stands in contrast with the extended length of time the developed and printed photographs of the scene are held on screen in the sequence in which Thomas sets out to analyse them.