Photography And Cinema

Viewers today move easily between film and the still image: video and DVD are thoroughly changing the nature of cinema, making it much more like a set of consumed fragments; photography has become a digital medium with increasingly undefined boundaries; even cultural theory is focusing on the points at which media intersect and overlap. It is curious then that previous histories of photography and film have been written as if the two media were all but separate. 'Photography and Cinema' brings the two together, showing how, to a large extent and in a great variety of ways, each medium has borrowed from the other, and how this has allowed them both to conquer new visual territory. David Campany explores photographers on screen; photographic and filmic stillness; photographs in film; the influence of photography on cinema; photo essays and photo novels in print; and the photographer as filmmaker. He shows how visual media are often at their most dynamic when in dialogue with one another, and how photography and cinema have had the richest and most sustained dialogues of all the arts. Considering a wide range range of material, from Alfred Hitchcock to Michael Snow; from Edward Weston to 'The Matrix'; from Leni Riefenstahl to Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall; and from Buster Keaton to 'Bladerunner', 'Photography and Cinema' is an unusual and unprecedented mix of art, photography, and film. Featuring diverse images in colour and black and white, this is a highly stimulating and suggestive book, accessible to the general reader as well as to the specialist interested in film and photography.