The Ubiquity of Cinema

Photography was around long before cinema, but in an ever-increasingly technologically complex and multimedia world it is nearly impossible to work in one medium, say photography, and not be influenced in some way by every other medium regardless of its relation or recency, like cinema. Roland Barthes said that a movie only becomes truly filmic when its motion was completely frozen (Campany, p.135, 2010). Barthes’ position on the idea of filmic, and how cinema only becomes filmic when it is effectively turned into a photograph is interesting and could easily fill a whole separate writing. His view does, however, highlight the importance of the link between these two media. If one were to pause

a film and present it as a single photograph, as Barthes suggests, then the line between photography and cinema becomes blurred. Just as cinema has used photography since its invention, photography uses cinema. George Baker in Still Moving (2008) says “For the photographic object theorized then has fully succumbed in the last ten years to its digital recoding, and the world of contemporary art seems rather to have moved on, quite literally, to a turn that we would now have to call cinematic rather than photographic.” The digital age, providing easy access to both still photography and moving image to everyone, and the ubiquity of film and television that surrounds us made possible in part by the digital revolution, has left contemporary photographers engulfed by imagery originating from cinema. It is impossible now to create work truly free from the influence of cinema, Baker (2010) states “even the most traditional of a younger generation of contemporary photographers cannot now resist the impulse to deal with concerns of other mediums into their practice,”