Stillness and Movement in photography
There are various ways to look at a photograph: you can run the pages of a magazine and your eye jumps continuously from a picture to another, for example, or you can wander through the rooms of a museum and suddenly set your eyes on something that has captured your attention. In both cases the images are still and it is your body that chooses to stop in order to admire them; in a sense, you join the stillness of the picture, little by little the details emerge and in that moment your mind âstarts to moveâ.
The relationship between stillness and movement is one of the most interesting and discussed aspects of photography. Moreover, this subject, creates an immediate link with other forms of art, such as cinema, sculpture, painting, each of which has tried, in their own way, to seek a compromise between stillness and movement. These two words are antonyms, but from an artistic point of view they can be just two sides of the same coin.
Among the countless manners to create an image, we can divide photographers in two types: the âhuntersâ and the âfarmersâ. The first ones scout around for something amazing to happens and, guided by fate, they patiently wait the precise moment when a perfect scenery appears in front of their eyes; the second ones, on the other hand, are makers of the perfect scenery, they prepare meticulously their subject paying attention to every single detail. To be more clear, the âhuntersâ can be interpreted as those who work outside (street photographers, wild-life photographersâŚ), while the âfarmersâ can be considered those who work in the studio (fashion photographers, advertising photographersâŚ). Obviously the difference is not so radical, I have made a classification to better understand the process behind the pictures I am going to talk about.
The first photograph I take in to consideration was taken in 1964 by Harold Eugene Edgerton; it is called âShooting the appleâ and it belongs to a series of pictures used as a scientific study. Edgerton was an artist, inventor and professor of electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he designed a high-speed camera, known as Rapatronic Camera, which became his most famous work. This machine can record fractions of time, such as 10 nanosecond, that human eye cannot perceive (this particular photo, for example, was shot with a shutter speed of 1/3 microsecond) and a particular photographic technique of multi-flash. The image shows a red and yellow apple pierces by a sort of a metal pedestal, the background is turquoise-blue and almost flat; the calmness of this still-life is broken by the presence of a 30 caliber bullet which has just transfix the fruit. The sides of the apple are shattered in a quite symmetrical way, while the front of the fruit is intact, untouched. The scientist used this image during a lecture, entitled "How to Make Applesauceâ at MIT to show that the explosion of a bullet at the entry is as powerful as the exit. The speed of a bullet is so fast that arresting its path seems impossible, but this picture proves the opposite; it became an icon in both science and photographic art and Edgerton became known as âthe man who was able to freeze the timeâ. I like to consider him as the perfect link between the âhuntersâ and the âfarmersâ, which I mentioned before. Behind his works there is an immense preparation and deep detailed studies of both the subject and the machine, nevertheless he couldnât be absolutely sure about the outcome. It is this hint of mystery and unknown that makes Harold Edgertonâs photographs so beautiful and spellbinding. Among his amazing and innovative pictures, some notable ones are: âMilk-drop coronetâ, he cycloid curve of a wheel, the motion of a diver who flips backwards, the movements of a tennis player and a golfer, the flight of a hummingbird. All these photographic studies about speed and movement show us how this pioneer of both photography and science was fascinated by what the human being cannot see and his interest in slowing the world in order to change this condition.
This approach to photography could be seen as the peak of the studies about movement that Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey did approximately a century before. In the second half of the nineteenth century these two photography avant-garde started thinking about a way to represent an action with the help of a camera to replace the, by now âoutmodedâ and inaccurate, drawing; a horse running was the first subject of Muybridge. His aim was to understand the position of the animalâs four legs during a race. He placed twenty-four cameras on the ground and the horse triggered a mechanism which allowed the cameras to shoot. Marey, on the other hand, chose to record the movement of the human body and the flight of birds in one single photograph, using a kind of photographic riffle, he personally invented, which, shooting continuously, broke the entire action in a series of pictures that were put all together at a later time. Both Muybridge and Marey works have a fundamental historical importance not only from a scientific point of view, but they are also the physical representation of how fast and important the development of photography was. As a matter of fact their studies led to the birth of cinema just few years later.
There is a strong connection between cinema and photography, in fact a movie is basically composed by a long series of photographs taken in a very little fraction of time; however, there are also many differences between the two. We are used to consider photography as the representation of stillness and cinema the representation of movement. This idea might stems from the fact that the original purpose of cinema was exactly about that: make an image move. In this way it would have been possible to record facts and events not only through static images, but also through real video, making a document as close as possible to reality. The history of cinema begin with the famous Louis and Auguste Lumière, who, in 1895, projected a âmovieâ (a short movie of a running train) for the very first time, inside a room of the Grand CafĂŠ in Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The two brothers invented a rudimentary cine-camera, the âCinĂŠmatographeâ, a single machine which was both camera and projector. As well as for photography, after its invention, the development of cinema increased rapidly. At the same time the question about the relationship between the two new subjects started to pervade the mind of the artists. Is the gap between cinema and photography so wide and radical? In 1963, the visionary pop-art artist Andy Warhol created a film, called âSleepâ lasting for six hours of a man (the poet John Giorno) sleeping in his own bed. The movie was not really about the sleeping man; Warhol was interest in the role that time plays in cinema and, as a consequence, he tried to explore the subject from a different point of view by mixing together the stillness of photography and the movement of the video. I like to interpret this work of art as a still movie, but also as a moving photograph. âWhat finally broke that first bond between photographers and film-makers was the arrive of sound in 1929â, wrote David Campany in his book âPhotography and cinemaâ (D. Campany 2008) and perhaps he made the point. The presence of sound in movies is the biggest difference that cinema has with photography and it is unequivocally a point greatly in its favour. Of course it is not a competition about which one is a better mean of communication; as for the cinema, photography covers aspects that are peculiar.
In his essay âFire and Iceâ (1984), Peter Wollen described film as incessant motion and transience and photography as something frozen and motionless. Personally, I am not completely agree with this sentence. Photography requires the motion of our mind and our imagination: looking at a picture you can still give your personal interpretation to it, while as for movies you are forced to see the story through the director eyes. Furthermore, while a video possesses a specific duration of time, a photograph does not. This statement recalls me the discourse about the role of time that I mentioned before. When we talk about stillness and movement we take in to consideration the time too, inevitably.
Our lives are a continuous flow of events and moments, the aim of photography is to grasp a little fraction of this flow making it timeless. The most notable photographer who looked at this topic was Henri Cartier Bresson, who is considered the father of photojournalism and his works of street photography are acclaimed worldwide. In 1952, he published a book which became his masterpiece: âThe decisive momentâ, the âbibleâ of photographers. Here he theorized a specific method to take pictures taking his own work as example; he took in to consideration all the aspect of photography: the colours (or the tones for black and white), the technique, the composition, how to put images in sequenceâŚ. The photographer was convinced that the camera is an extension of the eye and it simply registers the decision made by the person. As a consequence we have to pay attention to every single detail at the moment we are taking the picture. The second image I am going to talk about was taken by Cartier-Bresson in Paris in 1932 and it is called âDerriere la Gare Saint-Lazareâ (behind Saint-Lazare station); it was elected âThe Photo of the Centuryâ by Time magazine (Alex Selwyn-Holmes, 2009). The black and white picture is divided horizontally in three levels: the background with the station and the roof of some buildings, in the middle there is a high railing with some signs and a man, in the foreground there is a man jumping from a ladder in a waterhole, the figure is blurred while everything around him is on focus. Every single detail is still and the only presence of movement is given us by the action of the mysterious man in the foreground, this represent a perfect example of the dialogue between stillness and movement. The meeting point of the two aspects is the shoeâs heel that is about to touch the water; it is a suspended moment and we can also guess what is going to happen. What is brilliant about this photograph is the perfect balance between the rhythm of the lines and the relationship of the shapes which make the scene a fascinating example of suspended moment. In this period the photographer was young, an amateur in search of his own path. However, this image totally represents the idea of decisive moment that Henri Cartier-Bresson will theorize twenty years later.
As a form of art, photography has many aspects in common with painting and sculpture. A photograph can be considered as an âalternative paintingâ or an âalternative sculptureâ, we look at them and perceive them in the same way. Â As a matter of fact, studying photography (or some of its aspects such as the relation between stillness and movement), we cannot ignore the connection with the other forms of art. Looking at the history of art, is possible to find a long tradition of artists trying to hold the movement in a single picture or a static sculpture: Masaccio depicted Bible stories entirely in one scene by reproducing the characters many times in different places, the Impressionists used the tache (smudge) technique to make the elements of their paintings more alive, Umberto Boccioni in 1913 created his most famous sculpture âForme uniche della continuitĂ nello spazioâ which, through the distortion of body parts and muscles, represents the synthesis of the movements of a man running. In spite of this, the most striking attempt to hook up the movement and the stillness was made in 1913 by Marcel Duchamp, a french conceptual artists account for the invention of the Ready-made technique. His work of art, âBicycle wheelâ, is a sculpture composed by a wooden stool on which a bicycle wheel stands upside-down. It is consider as the emblem of the conceptual revolution of the twentieth century avant-garde art. The sculpture is a complete paradox: neither the stool or the wheel are employed for their original purpose, but together symbolised the ideal interpenetration of stillness and movement. This is not a photographic example, nevertheless I like to consider a sculpture as a three-dimensional image and a picture as a two-dimensional sculpture with its own kind of plasticity.
Doing my researches about the theme of stillness and moment in photography, I have found that these two aspects are the heart of every form of art. The first one exists just because the other one exists too and they always appear equally. One of the great dilemma of photography (as well as for paintings) it has always been that to be unable to include the movement in the representation of reality; the innovation that cinema brought as a more complete mean of communication, didnât allow photography to succumb. Photographers understood that is not necessary to create a series of images reproduced in sequence to obtain the illusion of movement, but even a single picture can transmit the same thing trough a more imaginative way. In this essay I have express my idea on the subject taking in to consideration the opinion of some experts, by doing it I have understood that movement can be found especially in still images, because is where is more visible. When a picture seems completely still is because it requires a deeper attention: the lines, the shapes create a type of movement that is more difficult to find and more surprising at the same time.
