Soundslides Audio Photography · Saturday April 14, 2007
First there were home pages, built in crude but sweet HTML: tables, clunky text on bright backgrounds and, if you were really daring, maybe an animated gif. Then came the blog, and development shifted from Dreamweaver to the CMS, less concerned with arty Photoshop type design than lean and efficient content management. Quick on its heels was the photoblog, and I thought we were nearly there. Easy on the eye, personalised, visual, changing, interesting; photoblogs have never been central to internet culture, but they should be. And after a side-track into video and YouTube, we arrive at audio photography. YouTube is great, and it’s also massive, but essentially it’s a distribution channel and social space built around a pre-existing form. The arty stuff was done when video first appeared back in the seventies, it was mostly crude and embarrassing, and now only someone like Bill Viola does it properly with elegance, power, and depth. And it’s not online.
There is, actually, a history to audio photography. But it’s a quiet one and like singing in a distant valley, it’s neither loud nor obvious. The 1959 film Jazz on a Summer’s Day by Bert Stern is built on stills photography. He was first and foremost a photographer with a filmic ambition he then realised, but where he used the same photographic aesthetic. It’s an artistic documentary full of cool photographic moments like this, in the steal-the-show act from a magnetic Anita O’Day:
Damn, what happened to the ladies like that? Well, they ended up adoringly archived at YouTube.
Jazz On A Summer’s Day is of course a film, but with a disjunction between sound and visuals: less a filmic record, than an elegant composite of photography and audio. When the two are invisibly blended, or indeed never separate, we see the conventional cinematic form. We need this seamless conjunction for most of the time, but breaking it apart creates a new creative space where we are less immersed in the experience for greater, not lesser effect. Barthes notes this difference in his Camera Lucida: photography, he said, allowed him a greater time, a more extended space, allowing for a more reflective response than is possible with film. Media technology has gone down a relentless track into greater and greater absorption, based on the supposition that the more immersed and involved you are the better it is. I don’t agree. Soundslides, the software I’m currently using, say “Soundslides is a rapid production tool for still image and audio web presentations”. Indeed. And breaking apart the assumed blending of sound and visuals is a creative possibility going off on another trajectory, with its own creative possibilities
Some good points here. Playing with sound and pictures in a media learning environment in this way (I use iPhoto for slideshows) can lead to a developed understanding of each and how they relate. Also the soundslides/slideshows can become a way into making films, even a way of making rough cut films.
It might be worth seeing how the flickrworld develops the idea of the ‘long photo’ and short movie.
http://www.flickr.com/help/video/
— Tony Hall · Apr 27, 07:21 PM · Tony Hall">§
Hi Tony yes it’s an interesting area to think about, the intersection between the still and moving image and a medium which is neither – but which remains ‘photographic’.
— James Lomax · Apr 28, 06:45 PM · James Lomax">§