with photography will fade or, more likely, new means of articulating the
digital still will emerge.
PhotographersonScreen
We can extend the question of whether film has access to an essence of
photography by looking at the portrayal of photographers themselves.
With a few exceptions cinema tends to depict them as rather dysfunctional
outsiders. They are often misfits and loners immersed in, yet out of kilter
with, the worlds they inhabit. We can trace this persona back at least a
far as Lloyd Bacon’sPicture Snatcher( 1933 ), in which James Cagney plays
an ex-convict turning to the ‘honest’ profession of photography, only to
end up sneaking illegal pictures of an execution. It has continued up to
and beyond the naïve amateur hailed by the art world in John Waters’s
Pecker( 1998 ).
This may be a misrepresentation, but in many respects this is what
photographers value about their medium. It permits them an involvement
in the world, while enabling them to remain apart from it. If we were
uncharitable, we could see this as an essence of the medium in the sense
that many of photography’s more pessimistic critics (Siegfried Kracauer,
Jean Baudrillard, Susan Sontag and Guy Debord among them) have
argued that photography offers little more than a dangerous substitute
for true intimacy, true exchange and true knowledge. For them, the glass
lens is as much a barrier as a conduit of social exchange. Photographs
may actually cut us off and insulate us in our partial view at the very
moment they appear to offer their account of things.
From this perspective we can once again consider the photojournalist
inRear Window.He is unusual in that he takes no photographs during the
film. For Hitchcock, a photographer is above all someone who looks for
a living. Their voyeurism is socially licensed. It requires a safe distance,
a vantage point for the observer beyond the reach of the observed. InRear
Windowthe photographer is cut off not just by the lens of his camera, the
glass window of his apartment, or the abyss of the courtyard across which
114 he stares. It is hisprofessionthat cuts him off, that demands his separation.
101 Poster forThe Picture Snatcher
(Lloyd Bacon, 1933).