Richard BF

In Lives on hold, I wrote about how photographs from the early days of photography, were posed, and gave up little about the people contained within. Andreas unfortunately interpreted this as meaning video is the first medium to capture the everyday, which is unfortunate, and certainly not what I meant.

Take, for example, the following photo, of a public demonstration against child labour (from the Library of Congress), probably taken on 1st May 1909. In what should be a serious concern for the protestors (child labour), against the backdrop of a rather important day of demonstration (Labour day), the two women look happy, perhaps proud, while at least three people are more interested in the fact that a photo is being taken than anything else. Only one person, a small boy at the front, perhaps exposes his real emotion, unaffected by the presence of the camera. While this is a snapshot of time, and shows some real people in real historical clothing, that’s about all it shows. It is a snapshot of a moment, but the moment that is captured is “several people emotionally affected by the presence of a camera”.

Much like measurement in quantum mechanics, most photos of this period are affected by the presence of the camera, with most people either posing emotionally neutral, or having their emotions affected by the act of “capturing the moment”. This in effect creates a false impression or representation of the moment.

Andreas suggested The difference [between photography and video] is simply that the photography freezes a blink of an eye in time, while the video records a series of blinks. This is of course technically accurate, but again not what I was referring to in my original post.

My point is that early photography is more posed and more a false impression of real life, because the camera generally affects people in the shot. Thus most photos of people of that time are distorted both emotionally and structurally, because the camera was a fascinating new invention. That tradition has continued to today, in that people still change their emotional and postural state whenever a still camera is nearby.

Video is generally ignored by people when they are the subject of it, or if not, at least the series of blinks [of an eye] do show moments of real emotion in a real moment of time. With photography, we as subjects still tend, completely out of habbit, to pose emotionally neutral or unrealistically happy, whenever we see ourselves being photographed. My family photo album is full of me smiling away throughout my life, when generally, my personal experience is much more the opposite. I’m not saying that still photos are posed and that video is not, but that video has more opportunity to capture people snapping out of their put on photographic poses.

That is what I meant by my original post.

Now, not only does the presence of a measuring device (the camera) affect the measurement (the photo), but the use of black and white (and sepia) as the display medium, also gives us a distorted view of reality. Colourised versions of black and white films show people wearing an array of multicoloured suits. Did the restoration technicians research the actual colours, or did they simply choose whichever colour they thought would look good? In black and white photos, we assume that people of the 1930s all wore grey. Did they? Was their world such a depressive grey wash, or has the emotion of The Depression coloured (sic) our perception of what life was really like at that time? The video enclosed with this post could be perceived as a dark and forboding ocean on an alien world, which is not exactly the impression that the residents of Bawley Point would like to give prospective visitors to their quite beautiful surrounding beaches.

Will we ever be able to preserve a snapshot of time, independent of the affect of the camera? Perhaps not, but the ubiquity of the video camera, and its ability to capture a series of blinks, will come a long way toward betraying false posing and should portray real people doing real things with real emotion. It is not black and white (sic), but it does give us a better opportunity than the still image camera.