Still Photography Research Paper

Words: 906
Pages: 4

We live in an iPhone age. Those big and expensive handycams from the 1980s have given way to smartphones, tablets and YouTube. If history is a guide, these innovations will one day seem as quaint as the old eight-track tapes. But they are definitely landmarks, representing a substantial turn in our relationship to photo making. iPhones and the technologies related make it possible for us to make a very good quality video easily. One day, shooting a single photo will seem unnecessary. As the quality of motion pictures improve, someday we may stop taking still pictures altogether, shooting video instead and taking stills, if we want them, in editing.
After the Lumière Brothers screened their first film Exiting the Lumière Factory in Lyon at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, in 1895, motion pictures have held a very special place in the public imagination. Photographers then quickly absorbed their influence, and a lot of the major movements in cinema, from German Expressionism to the French New Wave, have had lasting effects on the practice of still photography. This is what might be termed, in photography terms, cinematic style. Renowned directors such as Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock, for example, had distinctive visual
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They are usually presented as independent, self-contained disciplines. This is a shortcoming, in part, of siloing academic culture and the way existing histories were written, and it also reflects how photography and motion pictures have been treated in the art marketplace. Beyond the fine arts, photography became the stuff of family albums, magazines, newspapers and advertising supplements. Cinema and television, on the other hand, quickly morphed into entertainment. On the face of it, it makes sense. If photography and film are used differently, why not treat them