Photography and Cinema

Similarly, buying old film stills to reuse them cost next to nothing.^24

Artists worked cheaply and there was no art market to support them. But

in the last decade or so the market has grown and more artists have been

able to make photographs at a scale more typical of cinema. (Meanwhile,

of course, significant films are being made on digital video for less than

the budgets of some photo shoots.)^25 Crewdson has even hired film crews

to help him realize his tableaux and used Hollywood actors as models.

His catalogues boast production credits like those at the end of movies.

One photograph from the seriesDream Housefeatures Julianne Moore,

sitting pensively on her bed while a man sleeps beside her. Moore had

already refined a withdrawn demeanour in several film roles, notably

Todd Haynes’sSafe( 1995 ), in which her gestures are unnervingly

minimal. Crewdson finds a suitable overlap between her contained

screen persona and her presence in the photograph.

Of all cinema’s genres it is film noir and its derivatives that have

proved the most attractive to photographers whether in fashion, adver-

tising or art. What they appropriate most often is a shorthand style or

mood. Certainly it is easy to think of ‘noir’ as a set of visual motifs –

high-key lighting, deep focus, dark shadows, silhouettes, disorienting

mise-en-scène, vertiginous angles and extreme close-ups. But it is more

than a visual style. There are many movies that have this look that are

not really noir films, while many noir films look very different.^26 They

can be set on a spaceship or in a desert because the essence lies beyond

the visual in matters of human psychology (guilt, suspicion, jealousy,

betrayal, weakness, revenge). For a photographer seeking more than pas-

tiche or a short cut to moodiness this can present a problem. One of the

more successful engagements is the photographer and filmmaker Mitra

Tabrizian’s seriesCorrect Distance( 1986 ). One image is modelled on a

scene from Michael Curtiz’sMildred Pierce( 1945 ). Mildred (played by

Joan Crawford) comes across her lover in an embrace with her daughter.

We see the two kissing, followed by a counter-shot of Mildred’s tense

reaction. Tabrizian condenses the two shots the way a stills photographer

would, so that the situation can be grasped in one frame. She also con-

denses the emotion of the situation. We get the action and the reaction

combined, enriched by a text that mixes the language of psychoanalytic 141