153four:ArtandtheFilmStill1 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Camera’s Glass Eye: A Review of an
Exhibition of Edward Weston’,The Nation( 9 March 1946 ); reprint-
ed inArt and Photography, ed. David Campany (London, 2003 ),
pp. 222 – 3.
2 I discuss this idea in more detail in ‘Straight Images, Crooked
World’, inSo Now Then, ed. Christopher Coppock and Paul
Seawright (Cardiff, 2006 ), pp. 8 – 11.
3 John Swope,Camera Over Hollywood(New York, 1939 ). This partic-
ular photograph was taken in 1937. Margaret Bourke-White also
photographedmgmback lots in 1937 , including the same sets as
Weston and Swope; see ‘Sound Stages Hum with Work on Movies
for 1938 ’,Life( 27 December 1937 ), pp. 39 – 46. Forty years later the
artist John Divola documentedmgm’s unused and derelict New
York back lot at Culver City, California (seewww.divola.com).
4 Mary Ellen Mark,Ward 81 (New York, 1979 ).
5 SeeThumbsucker: Photography from the Film by Mike Mills(New York,
2005 );Babel: A Film by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu
[photographs by Mary Ellen Mark, Patrick Bard, Graciela Iturbide
and Miguel Rio Branco] (Cologne, 2006 ); and Gautier Deblond,
Morvern Callar(London, 2002 ).
6 The other photographers were Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson,
Ernst Haas, Erich Hartmann and Dennis Stock. See Serge
Toubiana,The Misfits(London, 2002 ), and George Kouvaros,
‘The Misfits: What Happened around the Camera’,Film Quarterly,
lv/4(Summer 2002 ), pp. 28 – 33.
7 See James Goode,The Story of the Misfits(Indianapolis,in, 1963 ).
8 See Anne Hoy, ed.,Annie on Camera(New York, 1982 ). The other
photographers were Jane O’Neal, Neal Slavin, Eric Staller and
Robert Walker. The project was the idea of the film’s producer,
Ray Stark.
9 Using photographs as reference is common practice is film produc-
tion design. Twenty years afterAnnie, Jacob Riis’s photographs
were again used as reference for the sets of Martin Scorsese’s
Gangs of New York( 2002 ), built at Cinecittà, Rome. Stephen Shore’s
photograph reworks the composition of Paul Strand’sThe Lusetti
Family, Luzzara, Italy( 1953 ).
10 I trace this historical difference, which was once very real, between
‘art photographers’ and ‘artists using photography’ inArt and
Photography, pp. 16 – 20.
11 Jeff Wall, ‘Interview / Lecture’,Transcript,ii/3( 1996 ).
12 Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye,The Fae Richards Photo Archive
(San Francisco, 1996 );The Watermelon Woman(Cheryl Dunye,
1996 ).
13 ‘Make it big’ is a literal Urdu translation of ‘blow up’, which also
hints at the aspiration of the project.
14 John Divola,Continuity(New York, 1998 ).
15 In 1978 Divola visited the abandoned ‘New York’ back lot built by
mgmin Culver City outside Hollywood (location shooting had
become cheaper and audiences preferred it). He photographed the
flimsy façades, derelict cars and fake boulders. The back lot was
falling into ruin and was demolished shortly after. See David
Campany, ‘Who, What, Where, With What, Why, How and When?
The Forensic Rituals of John Divola’, inJohn Divola: Three Acts
(New York, 2006 ).
16 Roland Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some
Eisenstein Stills’,Artforum,ix/ 5 (January 1973 ). First published as
‘Le troisième sens’,Cahiers du cinéma, 222 (July 1970 ).
17 There are echoes here of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘optical
unconscious’ that might be brought to the surface of things when
the high-speed shutter or close-up lens appear to penetrate the
obvious meanings of the world and reveal something deeper.
Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’ [ 1931 ], inOne
Way Street(London, 1979 ), pp. 240 – 57.
18 Wall discusses his relation to cinema and the still in ‘Frames of
Reference’,Artforum(September 2003 ), pp. 188 – 93.
19 See John Stezaker, ‘The Film Still and Its Double’, inStillness and
Time: Photography and the Moving Image, ed. David Green and
Joanna Lowry (Brighton, 2006 ); and David Campany, ‘Once More
for Stills’, inPaper Dreams: The Lost Art of Hollywood Still
Photography, ed. Christoph Schifferli (Göttingen, 2006 ).
20 ‘It was not a question of imitating cinematic techniques or making
pictures that resembled film stills. It was only a question of follow-
ing the thread of recognition that films were made from photo-
graphs and were essentially acts of photography.’ Jeff Wall, ‘Frames
of Reference’, pp. 188 – 93.
21 The former method was used in the making ofVolunteer( 1996 ),
a photograph of a tired man mopping the floor of a community
centre, the latter in the making ofEviction Struggle( 1988 ) and
Outburst( 1986 ), a photograph of a sweatshop boss exploding
with rage at an employee. See ‘Posing, Acting and Photography’,
inStillness and Time, ed. Green and Lowry.
22 Of course, the convention goes a long way back in the history of art.
Think of the odd but pictorially natural way in which the disciples
sit along just one side of the table in depictions of theLast Supper.
23 Roger Callois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’,October, 31
( 1984 ), pp. 17 – 32 ; Henri Bergson, ‘The Intensity of Psychic States’,
inTime and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Conscious-
ness(London, 1910 ).
24 In 1995 a full set of Sherman’s 65 Untitled Film Stillssold to the
Museum of Modern Art in New York for a million dollars (far more
than any ‘real’ film stills).
25 See the email exchange between Jeff Wall and the filmmaker Mike
Figgis inThe Cinematic, ed. David Campany (Cambridge,ma, and
London, 2007 ), pp. 158 – 67.
26 For a visual definition of film noir, see J. A. Place and L. S.
Petersen, ‘Some Visual Motifs inFilm Noir’, inMovies and Methods,