44
StillPhotography,Still
In photography something of this loss of faith in speed can be measured
against the steady waning of interest in the instantaneous snapshot.
As we have seen, it was only from the 1920 s, in the shadow of cinema
and with the growing dominance of print journalism, that photography
became the modulator of the concept of the event. Good photo-reporters
followed the action, aiming to be in the right place at the right time.
This lasted until the late 1960 s, with the standardized introduction of
portable video cameras for news coverage. Over the last few decades
the representation of events has fallen increasingly to video and was
then dispersed across a variety of platforms. As television overshadowed
print media, photography lost its position as a medium of primary
information. It even lost its monopoly over stillness to video and then
digital video, which provides frame grabs for newspapers as easily as
it provides moving footage for television and the Internet. Today,
photographers often prefer to wait until an event is over. They are as
likely to attend to the aftermath because photography is, in relative
terms, at the aftermath of culture. What we see first ‘live’ or at least in
real time on television might be revisited by photographers depicting
the stillness of traces.
In this way immersion in subject matter has given way to distance.
Sharp reflexes have given way to careful strategy. The small format has
given way to the large. Nimbleness and a ‘quick eye’ are passed over as
photographers attune to the longer wave rhythms of the social world.
As a consequence the photographic image becomes less about the ‘hot’
decisiveness of the shutter and more about the ‘cold’ stoicism of the lens.
Where the boundaries between the still and moving image are breaking
down the photographic image circulates promiscuously, dissolving into
the hybrid mass of mainstream visual culture. But where photography
attempts to separate itself out and locate a particular role for itself, it is
decelerating, pursuing a self-consciously sedate, unhurried pace. Slower
working procedures are producing images more akin to monuments
than moments. Many of the defining photographic projects of the last
decade or so have been depictions of aftermaths and traces in the most
previous spread: 29Victor Burgin,
Nietzsche’s Paris(1999). Single screen
video projection.