Robert Frank

Which is truer to life: photography or moving images?

From The Americans by Robert Frank

"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." Robert Frank

Photography is to cinema what poetry is to the novel. Both a poem and a photograph can crystallise a moment. Both are accessible: everyone with a smartphone is a photographer just as all teenagers write poetry. However, very few people write a novel and even fewer make a movie. While I hesitate to say that the novel and cinema are superior forms, they are more popular and much harder to create.

There is a long tradition of photographers graduating to cinema and never looking back: Stanley Kubrick, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Anton Corbijn, for example, all of whom started with stills before they took the opportunity to make movies. The barrier to entry for making a film is so much greater, so it is no surprise that people would begin with photography.

But in the digital era, particularly with the quality of video on modern smartphones, I’m not sure this would still be the case. Video is easy on the phone, storage is less of a problem, and platforms like Instagram have pivoted away from photos to keep up with the popularity of TikTok. Instagram even encourage you to turn your photos into a video slideshow. Partly, this is because video encourages people to spend more time on the app, which allows them to sell more adverts, but mainly it is because people find it more compelling. Although such people aren't going to make feature films, it does call into question the place of photography.

Should you preserve your memories in photos or videos?

Every time you take a photo on the iPhone it creates a 3-second video they call a Live Photo. If the camera app is open, the phone is recording. It then uses its algorithm to select a frame where no one is blinking. You can override this, select your own preferred image, and even export the video. So why not just forget photos and make everything video? It would be like the Wanted posters in Harry Potter.

This week saw the launch of Apple's Vision Pro, a virtual reality headset that can record videos in fake 3D. In their original introduction, Apple presented a man on his own reliving memories of when his kids were still around. What they didn't mention is that he would have been wearing the clunky goggles at the time to record the kids. It was reminiscent of Strange Days (1995) or 'The Entire History of You' episode of Black Mirror.

The implication is that the device preserves memories better. But this is not how memory works. As

Internal exile

writes:

Roose gushes over the Vision Pro’s purported ability to record “memories” with a greater amount of detail. [...] There is a naïve faith here that what makes memories affecting is how detailed they are, that somehow memories might not be “realistic” enough. If you record some event with enough fidelity, the recording will do the work of remembering for you, and you won’t have to worry about it again. Memories are conceived as a quantum of information, a signal muffled by the noise of time. This seems like a tragic misapprehension of what memory consists of, like reading Proust and wishing he could have just watched some home movies instead of writing all those boring words.

Robert Frank's The Americans

I've been thinking about the relationship between photography and film after looking into the work of Robert Frank. Frank was a Swiss photographer who came to America after the Second World War and obtained a Guggenheim grant to go on a road trip documenting America. The book he made, The Americans, condensed 28,000-odd negatives into 83 stark, poetic photographs.

Originally published in France in 1958, it was republished in America in 1959 with an introduction by beat writer, Jack Kerouac. It became a photographic complement to his rambling novel, On the Road, showing the reality of American life behind the advertisements.

But once the book was published Frank effectively abandoned photography to make films. The most notorious of these is Cocksucker Blues (1972), a tour diary of The Rolling Stones, whose circulation was legally blocked by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both of whom are shown in it taking drugs. It is a fascinating insight into the tedium of life on tour, but mainly famous for being suppressed and still only available in grainy bootlegs. Even with the drugs and the groupies, it is a pretty tedious documentary and makes one wonder why Robert Frank didn't carry on taking his evocative photos.

One clue can be seen in this quote from Frank about his exasperation with photography:

"There are too many images, too many cameras now. We're all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It's just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn't an art anymore. Maybe it never was."

Photography becomes, over time, relentlessly and inescapably repetitive. There are so many echoes in photography that the camera's algorithm can just fill in the details with reference photos.

But Frank did return to photography. In a way. In The Lines of My Hand (1972), he used collages and contact sheets, as well as photographs, scratching words into the images, to create a strange autobiography after his daughter died. It is deeply moving, even if the frames aren't moving.

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The photographs in this article are used for criticism and review under the Fair Dealing provision of UK Copyright Law. All rights to the image remain with the photographer/copyright holder. This use does not claim any rights to the original work and is not for commercial purposes.

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Read the week in photos here:

The WIP #6: Beyond Belief