I love the way David Campany writes. It’s for the same reason I love the way Geoffrey Batchen writes: it’s lucid, personally felt, rigorously thought-through and informed, and with a general readership in mind. You don’t need to knee-deep in postmodern theory, or catapulted from your private fine art niche to hear what he has to say.
I’ve read Photography and Cinema (2008) before, when I was studying for a Masters in Film & TV at the University of Bristol. Back then, I was thinking about looking at documentaries about photographers for my dissertation project (I didn’t, in the end). But having read Campany, I could see he not only had a profound grasp of film, but also knew how to talk to those working in film. In fact, until beginning a Masters in Photography, I hadn’t appreciated that photography was his point of departure.
What particularly impressed me about Photography and Cinema was Campany’s grasp and elucidation of the qualities, limitations and overlaps between the still and moving image. As a practitioner in both, and as one whose practice as a filmmaker, using fixed frames and long takes, was deeply inflected with the working methods of stills photography, I’m acutely aware of and curious about what makes a still image quite so still, and what makes a moving image truly moving, aside from technological differences. After all, the movement in Warhols’ Empire, is barely perceptible, while the blurred figure of Cartier-Bresson’s celebrated Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare is a trace of movement; to this extent, Warhol’s is more the still image, Cartier-Bresson’s more the moving one.
I’ve heard it said that such permeable boundaries between the two types of photography render the boundary arbitrary, yet another rigid binary for the all-conquering postmodern army to demolish. Permeable and arbitrary, sure, but to deny difference is to deny their qualities and usefulness. As Campany argues, this tension, this constant struggle over territory, is as old as the medium itself and practitioners in both fields, often using this site of conflict in their practice, are to be found ever since the inception of the moving photographic image, the younger of the two technologies.
Campany argues that what defines each, moving beyond photochemical or digital processes, is not what they are but what they are for. There is nothing inherent in such processes that determines their utility – moving image as popular entertainment, still image as scientific record, for example: rather, that lies in the domain of the cultural. The phenomenology of each is also defining: the still implies a past moment recorded, whereas the moving image provides an illusory presentness, and relate to the previous two examples which I have plucked at random: moving image as voyeurism, still as symbol, as fetish. To phrase it in terms of environmental psychology: the still and moving recorded photographic image offer different affordances.
Campany notes that the still and moving image are phrased differently depending on context. To be confronted with a still image – even if it’s actually a sequence of 25 frames per second – in which nothing appears to move accentuates its stillness, anticipates motion to an almost unbearable degree, and invites scrutiny: which is this? Still or moving? To come across a moving image where one would expect a still – such as a flat LED screen on a gallery wall – frustrates the idea of stillness, accentuates the perception that a movie screen is a window rather than a terminal surface. And yet, paradoxically, the still image implies duration in a way that the moving image does not: through accentuating its extraction from a continuous present, the moments bracketing it, stretching out infinitely, are implicated. This does not happen in the moving image: the illusory presentness of film implies an immediacy unavailable in the still, and one is trapped inside the moment of the film in a way that does not happen in the still. These paradoxes, especially when still and moving images are set against one another, liberate extraordinary, profound and distinctive effects.
This divergence deeply inflects the way narrative operates in each medium. At its most basic level, the moving image is a medium of narrative, even if that narrative is no more complex than ‘the blade of grass waved back and forth’. The still image, on the other hand, as with the painting, requires the imaginative engagement of the viewer to construct the narrative. Even when the images, moving or otherwise, are connected through editing or montage, the demand on imaginative engagement remains higher: it is, to the uninitiated, more effortful to ‘read’ a photobook than a short film, and this should not be seen as a difference in effectiveness but a difference in qualities. As Campany argues, ‘photojournalism requires journalism, because facts, however ‘powerful’, cannot speak for themselves’ (p.28); this cannot be said for video-journalism (should such a word exist), which has a wider range of communicative strategies and a more visually literature ‘readership’ (at least for the past several decades).
I’ve mentioned that my fondness – partly born from necessity – of fixed-frame long takes makes my filmmaking more ‘photographic’. Operationally, this makes my work more akin to the large-format landscape photographer than my rapidly-moving landscape still photographic practice, chasing light and change. It also taps into a rich tradition of avant-garde filmmaking which eschews the rapid-fire editing of commercial film, allowing the viewer to ‘dwell’ in an image in a way similar to how they might view an image on a gallery wall. This problematises filmmaking, calling attention to the event of recording and implying the present of the filmmaker to a greater extent than if the viewer were carried along on an endless stream of montage. Crucially undermining the perceived function of filmmaking, it drains image of narrative: the longer a shot persists, by and large, the more the uneventfulness of daily life is implied, narrative being an artificial imposition on its random, meaningless flow. It also opens up space for the viewer to exert agency, to gaze around an image of their own volution. The fixed-frame long-take is a cinema of surplus, and many of my favourite directors – Michaelangelo Antonioni, Kelly Reichardt, Gideon Koppel – grasp this. There is much I have yet to understand and articulate on what is known in some circles – already rejected by many filmmakers – as ‘slow cinema’. This post is not the place to engage with this matter fully, but will be the focus of my research in the coming weeks.
Campany, D. 2008. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books.











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