Page 114 - Expanded-Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 114/145
And there were a multiplicity of expansions in the 20th century, and in the 21st.
Listing them is an interesting exercise: A medium is in constant flux - constant gradual change, as new technologies - or even wholly new science - emerge, and nudge the medium one way or ano- ther like it’s seeking a perfect state that encapsulates its potential to be perfect. The medium’s practitioners, the artists, the entrepreneurs, the instrument makers, the showmen, the photo-che- mists, the studio-builders, the genre-makers, the amateur users- all play a role in this quest for perfection. You could define a perfect photographer as someone who knows - or discovers - how to harness these various forces - these specialisms - and to forge them into a work of art. The photographer has always been an experimentalist. The 20th century had produced its own ‘defini- tive’ art-form - the Cinema - an art form that owed much to Photography - in several ways. These include the invention of chrono-photography, Muybridge’s motion-capture and the zoopraxisco- pe, the Mutoscope, and eventually the more or less standard 35 mm movie camera; in form and content: the photo-essay - an often serial mapping of a subject - became the documentary; mo- tion-capture led to animation, live-filming of an early animator - like Winsor McCay or Emil Cohl - demonstrated the magic of frame-by-frame progressive drawings; George Albert Smith’s 1900 ex- periments with the close-up and Big Close-Up (BCU); the flip-book heritage of the Mutoscope; the magic lantern heritage of the projected large-scale cinema-image; the exposure speed; the herita- ge of the stills photographer’s studio - a lot to reckon with here - think on Mucha’s Studio, set de- coration, shades and mirrors and overhead (daylight) studio-lighting - and Julia Margaret Came- ron’s set dressing 30 years before - for her Idylls of the King photographs; think of how Courbet, Rossetti and Degas used photography in their art - all these layers of innovation, invention and creativity feeding into cinematography - and in the 20th century, the commercial success of the cinema feeding new cinematographic technologies back into stills Photography.
Alphonse Mucha: Model, styled, costumed and posing in the set dressing (mise-en-scène) of
his studio (1890s), preparation for a drawing.
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