Photography and Cinema

resembled discarded publicity stills from real films. On another, they

adopted the preferred format of purist fine-art photographers, many of

whom were quite baffled by Sherman’s game. Later, as art photography

began to explore greater scale, Sherman reprinted the series much larger,

evoking the cinema screen itself.

We should note here the ambiguity of the term ‘film still’. It can refer

to the extracted film frame (what Barthes called thephotogramme) or to

the publicity image taken by a photographer. After a successful take film

actors are often asked to do things ‘once more for stills’.^19 They convert

their acting into posing for a photographer, who must try to condense

something of the scene into a single, comprehensible shot. The advan-

tages of this are twofold. The photograph will be less grainy than a tiny

frame from the film-strip, and the gestures need not be grabbed from

the continuum but can be clarified for the still, avoiding some of the

ambiguity that Barthes described. However, Sherman’s stills seem to

encompass the staged photo and the extracted frame. Sometimes they

resemble publicity shots, sometimes grabbed moments, while many

belong somewhere between the two. Does Sherman pose or act, or act

as if posing, or pose as if acting? Does she poseforthe camera or is she

posedbyit? Or is it something even more complicated? Whichever it is,

we can say that Sherman hijacked the ‘look’ of classical narrative cinema

in three senses: its visual style, the camera’s look at the scene and the

performer’s directed looking, often at a point somewhere outside the

frame. Across her set of 69 stills it is this triple register of the look that

Sherman crystallized so effectively. Indeed, whenever we sense that a

photograph resembles a film still it is usually because it invokes some-

thing of each of these three looks.

Jeff Wall has described many of his images as ‘cinematographic’,

but all he signals by the term is the preparation and collaboration

involved in their making.^20 For Wall, Barthes had simply clarified the

fact that all cinema images are photographic in origin and thus all the

techniques associated with the making of film imagery could be put at

the service of still photography. Wall’s abiding interest has been the

depiction of everyday life, but early on he renounced the direct record-

136 ing of it. Moments, decisive or otherwise, could be noticed but passed