Adventures in motion pictures : Frozen fire

Abstract

If, as the critic Peter Wollen famously said, film is like fire and photography like ice, what happens when technological developments force an elision between the still and moving image and how does this affect the content of the picture? The development of new cameras that enable photographers to shoot high quality video has seen many moving effortlessly between the two mediums. Also, many editors and art directors are simply grabbing stills from HD video and using these as a photograph, making the unique vision of a photographer progressively more redundant. Echoing the 1960s argument that television would kill the traditional role of the documentary photographer, some are now arguing that the ability to shoot moving image on still cameras will eventually sound the death knell for photography as we know it