Photography and the Constant Moment
I read this
awesome Clayton Cubitt article on the implication
of the ubiquity of cameras on photography. He starts with how a
photographer used to be “like a hunter”:
“(Henri) Cartier-Bresson believed that
the photographer is like a hunter, going forth into the wild, armed with quick
reflexes and a finely-honed eye, in search of that one moment that most
distills the time before him. In this instant the photographer reacts,
snatching truth from the timestream in the snare of his shutter.”
That instant
when a photographer clicked his camera was the Decisive Moment. And so it used
to be a blink-and-you-missed-it world:
“One photographer. One lens. One camera.
One angle. One moment. Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”
Fast forward to
the present day:
“Imagine an always-recording 360 degree
HD wearable networked video camera…With a constant feed of all that she might
see, the photographer is freed from instant reaction to the Decisive
Moment, and then only faced with the Decisive Area to be in, and perhaps the
Decisive Angle with which to view it.”
Yes, this is the
present, not the future. Thanks to
Google Glass. Welcome aboard, folks: we just went from the Decisive Moment to
the Continuous Moment.
So what’s the
future going to be like? Cubitt points out the inevitable next step:
“Evolve this further into a networked
grid of such cameras, and the photographer is freed from these constraints as
well.”
With that, a few
possibilities leap to the mind:
“A street photographer could deploy them
all over a neighborhood of interest, catching weeks worth of decisive moments
to choose from at leisure. A photojournalist could embed them all across a war
zone, on both sides of the battle, to achieve a level of reality and
objectivity never seen before. A sports photographer could blanket the stadium
and capture every angle, for the entire game, even from each player's
perspective.”
Sure, there will
be the purists who would protest:
“Just as we still (!) have partisans that
argue film capture is more "genuine" than digital capture, we will
certainly have those who will argue that a photographer must be in a
place and time in order to genuinely photograph that place and time.”
Is that really
necessary? Or was Henri Cartier-Bresson, the man considered to be the father of
modern photojournalism, right in saying:
“People think far too much about
techniques and not enough about seeing."
Cubitt leaves no
doubt as to which camp he is on when he says the “here and now” will be
replaced with “anywhere and anytime.” He even goes so far as to say that this
trend may be the great leveler of photographers:
“It continues the photographic tradition
of artistic democratization by flattening limits of time, of geography, of
access.”
Welcome to the
brave, new world of photography!
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