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 ...