aside. Eventually, Sekula is removed by security guards for trespassing.^28
The reference to the first publicly screened film, the Lumières’Workers
Leaving a Factory( 1895 ), is clear but the difference is stark.
Photography has triumphed in art less by asserting some unique
essence than by connecting itself to the widest world of images. The gallery
has become the space to look again at the general field of the photographic,
to engage directly or indirectly in a dialogue with it. Thus the gallery has
come to be the host for ‘art versions’ of all the different fields of photog-
raphy: fashion, the snapshot, the portrait, the medical photograph, the
architectural photograph, the passport photo, the archival image, the legal
image, kitsch, the topographic image and, of course, the film still. These
forms sit alongside photography’s place within the existing genres of the
depictive arts: the still life, the portrait, the landscape, the city scene.
Art has become both a dissecting table to which the social photo-
graphic is brought for creative reflection and a set upon which it can be
reworked.Dissecting tableandset: these two metaphors map very well
onto what have become the two important impulses behind recent pho-
tographic art. On the one hand there is the forensic interest in evidence
and the photograph’s unrivalled but fraught relation to ‘the real’. On the
other there is the cinematic or anti-cinematic interest in the arts of move-
ment. Photography in art is somehow obliged to find its relation to visual
evidence and to the dominant culture of the moving image.
The story of art in the twentieth century and early twenty-first has
been played out as a tension between the artwork as fragment and the
artwork as unified whole. Should art show us the disunity of modern life
or attempt to piece it together? So it is little surprise that the film still has
engaged artists in different ways at different times. However consummate
its composition, however assured its realization, however perfect its
technical control, the film still always remains a piece of something else.
It is total and partial at the same time, whole yet fragmentary. Full of
meaning yet half empty.
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