theory with the cheap psychology beloved of film noir
trailers and posters.
The conversion of an edited film scene into a
single photograph entails a shift from the diachrony
of the sequence to the synchrony of the still. This is
also a conversion of space, from film’s multiple
positions to the frontal organization of the classical
tableau. In photography this makes for a very par-
ticular effect. The indexicality of a photograph
combined with its stillness tends to produce not just
a fixed record of the world but a fixed pointingatit.
A photograph seems to say ‘look at this’ or ‘this’.^27 More than that it says
‘look how things were at this moment’, whether that moment is fiction
or fact. Photography points at the world but also seems to orientate the
world towards the camera, promising its understanding. Hence the char-
acteristic ‘insistence’ and didacticism that permeates all photographs a
little. The frontal, anti-narrative photograph is the type most accepting
of this and the one that predominates in modernism. It is typified by the
sober, ‘straight’ photography of Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Edward
Weston, Paul Strand, August Sander and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Until
recently, modernist histories of the medium have tended to suppress
overtly theatrical forms, such as the nineteenth-century Pictorialist
tableaux of Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, along with
image sequences, narrative fashion and advertising photography and,
of course, film stills.
Even so, frontality comes with its own theatricality and perhaps its
own awkwardness too. We see it in the portraiture of Diane Arbus and
Rineke Dijkstra, for example. Allan Sekula’s ‘disassembled movie’Untitled
Slide Sequence( 1972 ) is a brilliant dissection of it, dramatizing the tension
that can exist in the physical encounter between the photographer and
the subject. Sekula placed himself directly in the way of aerospace techni-
cians going home at the end of a shift. Tired, they file past him. Some
workers look into the camera, but since these are still photos projected as
a slow sequence, we cannot tell if they are quick glances or longer stares.
Some workers accidentally bump into the photographer until he steps 143
opposite: 125 MitraTabrizian,
fromCorrectDistance(1986).
126 Henry Peach Robinson,FadingAway,
1858, albumen silver print.