Photography and Cinema

Abstract

A number of studies have explored the notions of “medium specificity” and “intermediality,” while others have analyzed the different ways in which photographs and films signify or the different phenomenological experiences they make possible. The notions of “photographic truth,” “indexicality,” “stillness,” and “movement,” and the relationship of photography and cinema to life, death, history, memory, and the unconscious, are recurring themes. The scholarship on photography and that on cinema trace two parallel tendencies in the history of the two media: on the one hand, the photograph as “trace” versus the tradition of staged photography; on the other hand, the “realist” versus “formalist” tendency in cinema. For most of its history, photography has been said to enjoy a privileged relationship to reality: the photograph has been described as “an imprint,” “a mold,” or “a trace” of reality. Parallel to the idea of the photographic index and the photography of spontaneous witness it gave rise to, however, is another tradition of photography, one that runs from early staged photography and pictorialist photography, through surrealist photography, to “cinematic photography”—this tradition foregrounds the discursive character of the photographic image, its origins in other images. While the history of photography has been defined by the tension between these two parallel traditions, the balance of power shifting from one to the other and back again, the digital turn is generally believed to have put an end to the idea of photography as “witness,” even as a number of early-21st-century photographers claim to pursue “new documentary” or “new realism” within a highly stylized, staged photography. The digital has provoked similar anxieties among film historians and theorists, who continue to debate whether the digital has brought about the disappearance of “cinema” or just the disappearance of “film.” The tension between these two parallel traditions in scholarship on photography and cinema has been complicated by a third criterion, according to which the two media have been theorized: stillness/movement. If indexicality and stillness have been the two key concepts in photography scholarship, movement has played a similar structuring role in the case of cinema. And just as the two dichotomies undergirding photography and cinema scholarship—the indexical versus discursive nature of the photographic image, and the realist versus formative tendency in cinema—are increasingly losing their credibility and usefulness, the still/moving distinction has also been challenged by the proliferation of hybrid artistic practices. This article is organized around four categories: (1) photography and cinema in their relation to modernity, (2) debates on medium specificity and the challenge of the digital both to photography and cinema, (3) cinematic photography, and (4) photography and cinema as “spectral” media.