even shot the same backdrop as Weston. His camera is further away and
off to the side. We see the scaffolding behind the backdrop and a set
builder at work.Its anti-illusionist caption reads: ‘Cities flourish for the
duration of production; a few brushstrokes wipe them out forever.’^3
Swope’s photography shows up the shallowness of the cinematic specta-
cle. Weston does this too, but he plays it as a formal game between the
depth and the flatness of the photograph. In different ways both make
use of the medium’s technical and cultural difference from cinema to
comment upon it as a source of popular myth.
The stark superficiality of film sets has attracted many photo-
graphers independent of the industry. In general, the results tend to be
meditations on artifice. Consider the image taken by the artist Robert
Cumming in 1977 of a mechanical shark’s fin, made forJawsii( 1978 ).
There is a particular consonance between the physicality of Cumming’s
camera and the ingenious subaquatic machine. Cumming used a 10 x 8 -
inch plate camera capable of rendering extraordinary detail. The shark’s
120 fin is a minor miracle of improvised tubing, rudders and motors. Who
104 Edward Weston,MGMStudios, 1939.