Photography and Cinema

of avant-garde cinema and theatre tends to involve stopping that flow,

shocking audiences out of their daydream, often by having players look

directly at them.) The stillness of photography is, of course, denied that

voyeuristic unfolding. Photography can suspend the world but not the

disbelief. Consequently, the staged narrative photograph that pretends

that the camera is not present, that depicts action in the realm of fiction,

never quite achieves cinema’s naturalism. It is always haunted by move-

ment and estranged by its own fixity.

The narrative photography that has become widespread in art in

recent years has made a virtue of this shortcoming, accepting and incor-

porating the inevitable awkwardness. Wall himself depicts situations that

are awkward anyway, where the human figures are already stiffened and

hampered by restrictive social relations. The unfreedom expressed by

reified body language has been a constant theme in his work and it is

entirely suited to the uneasy effects of staged photography. Similarly,

Cindy Sherman has depicted moments of psychological uncertainty.

The characters in her photographs seem to be stilled as much by conflict-

ing emotions as by the camera.

The gestural language in these kinds of image may strike us as curi-

ously automatic, deadly robotic even, as if the people are somehow enact-

ing gestures of which they do not appear to be fully conscious. To become

automatic is to commit blank mimicry, not unlike the act of photography

itself. Roger Callois once talked of mimicry possessing an estranging

force, while Henri Bergson remarked that humans behaving like automata

or robots may be a source of unexpected or uncanny affect, even anxious

humour.^23 In art the strangeness of photographed mimicry has been used

to distance us from the familiar. The narrative pose can draw attention to

its own arrestedness, setting up a space from which to rethink representa-

tions while making new ones. Everyday life can be re-examined through

engagingly static images of petrified social unrest.

Not surprisingly, the points of reference for this kind of photography

have been works that themselves play on overlaps between absorption and

theatricality, and between depicted movement and stillness. Many art

photographers cite or even quote the paintings of Vermeer, Chardin and

Hopper along with the films of Bresson, Antonioni, Hitchcock and Lynch. 139