As I’ve been working on my video-making skills during the COVID-forced remote teaching terms, I’ve noticed that photo- and videography offer very different experiences both from the creator’s and the viewer’s standpoint. I tried to analyze why this is the case, and came to the following hypothesis.
A still image creates a synthetic experience for the viewer. All the information in the picture is presented at once, so the viewer can make up their own version of the story. This doesn’t mean that it’s a synthetic experience for the creator, though. Actually, it takes a series of distinct, sequential steps to create a still image. For example, in the photography context, it could mean setting up the lighting, taking the photo and post-processing it. The sequential nature of still image-creation is even more apparent in classical painting, which involves sketching, mixing colours and painting multiple layers to render the form to various degrees of detail in the different parts of the image. The the finished painting is presented to the viewer, they see it all at once: the entirety of the shapes, colours and all the paint layers. It is then the job for the viewer’s brain to synthesize this information and formulate a story.
A movie, on the other hand, is an actual story. The viewer cannot ingest it all at once. The information has to be consumed as a sequence that was deliberately laid out by the author. Ironically, the process of creating a video is, in a sense, synthetic in that the author needs to have the entire process in their head, from how the footage needs to be shot to how it is going to be edited. Of course, post-processing is a big part of still photography too, but when I shoot photos, I am generally not making specific plans of how I am going to process them. With video, though, I am constantly re-evaluating how the footage I am capturing would be spliced together in the final product.
I think this difference in how the still and moving images are created and consumed is the reason that the emergence of mainstream video production did not result in extinction of still photography. The two genres are simply too different.