While some photographers try to resolve the problem of capturing movement within a still image by freezing it, others prefer to leave a trace of movement within the frame. One of the best-known examples of movement blur is Robert Capa’s Image of an American soldier wading ashore under fire on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France on D Day, June 6, 1944. If you view Capa’s Normandy Landings portfolio on the Magnum website you see that he captured many sharper and clearer images, so why has this shot become the iconic image of D Day? The grain and blur seems to lead a sense of authenticity to the shot, just as noise and pixelated Jpegs work as aesthetic codes for ‘realism’ in news photography today. https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/conflict/Robert-Capa’s-d-day-omaha-beach/
Movement blur as style (rather than accident or necessity) was used creatively by Robert Frank (b.1924) in his photobook The American (1958). Referring to Frank’s 1955 image Elevator Girl, Geoff Dyer imagines the elevator door as a shutter curtain whilst also referencing the idea of the road trip contained within Frank’s book:
‘An elevator door is about to close, like a shutter that will open again, for a moment, not on another floor but in another building or another city.’
Dyer, 2012, p.216
The length of time that can be recorded in the frame is unlimited if you use the bulb function on your camera. The Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto explored very long timeframes in his Theatres series, opening the shutter at the beginning of a film and closing it again as the credits rolled. These photographs are of American ‘movie theatres’ but the New York-based Sugimoto brings a particularly Japanese concern with ‘presence’ to his work. He explains his philosophy in a simple and clear way in the ‘Contacts’ film, which is available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY3nGoZqw9U
German photographer Michael Wesley used even longer exposures of between two to three years in his documentations of the renovations of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Wesely’s technique seems to capture totally new information about the universe on camera film. Strange steams of light in the sky.
‘Put our existence, us, our planet into contact with the Dance of the Universe, which coexists on an entirely different time scale’.
http://www.wesely.org
OCA student Alastair Gill recorded the passage of light through my home his home over periods of time. He captioned the images simply with a timestamp showing the duration of each exposure.
‘I began to study how light changed through my home through the course of a day and set up a camera in different positions to capture this ever-shifting phenomenon with an automated shutter release system’
(From Alsdair’s learning log)
When the movement of the camera rather than the subject is recorded in the frame, it’s usually regarded as a problem, requiring a faster shutter speed or a tripod to correct. The creator of the image below recorded the trembling movement of her hand due to Parkinson’s disease in a series of delicately expressive shots of night-time traffic on the knig’s Road in London.
The artist Maarten Vanvolsem also uses a moving camera, for example using the strip-scan process to photograph dancers. The technique captures single lines of a frame sequentially, building up the image over-time – and is cheaply available as a smart phone app. Venvolsem observed that if the camera is moving while the shutter shutter is open there is no single viewpoint and therefore no one-point perspective. The moving ‘stills camera’ creates a different perspective of space as well as time.
Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
Technically, this is a fascinating area and incredible images can be made just with a smartphone and a camera app. See London based photographer Gareth Davies’ wife-view and slitscan panoramic photographs at : http://www.tickpan.co.uk
Movement of course , is the natural province of cinema: at 24 frames a second the eye naturally reads a sequence of frames as movement. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle shot the opening scene to Wong Kar-Wal’s Chungking Express (1994) at 1/8 second, depicting the chase scene through a crowded Hong Kong market with movement blur, which is unusual in cinema. The poetics of time in the film are described by Mike D’Angelo in ‘How Wong Kat-Wai turned 22seconds into an eternity’: https://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/221-how-Wong-jar-wal-turned-22-seconds-into-an-eternit/ [assessed 18/01/18].
Can the shutter create psychological drama in an image, similar to Guy Bourdin’s use of deep depth of field (Part Two)? Gerry Badger sees the work of Francesca Woodman (1958-81) as combining ‘personalised psychodrama with the temporal and spatial displacements of long exposures and blurred movement’ (https://www.gerrybadger.com/woodman/ [accessed 18/01/18]. In other words, for Badger, Woodman’s emotional state (she committed suicide aged 22) is expressed visually through both time and space in her photography.
See: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/woodman-space-providence-rhode-island-1975-1978-ar00350 [accessed 18/01/18])
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Claire Clark 