DICK POUNTAIN
There’s an ontological difference between still photographs and videos, explains Dick, as he tries to dissect why he so often favours the former
There’s an ontological difference between still photographs and videos, says Dick, as he tries to dissect why he so often favours the former.
A still photo does something that’s otherwise impossible: it stops time. This is something your living eyes and brain refuse to do
Back home, my pictures looked odd and behaved even more oddly, until I realised that they were all actually videos
A lthough I have two shelves packed with cookery books, digital sloth dictates that nowadays I tend to go online and Google for a recipe rather than trying to find one there. Searching for “pork mushrooms kimchi” yields hundreds of matches. But if a link takes me to a YouTube video, I’ll back out sharply and try the next until I find one that’s just a still photo and a text recipe.
I spend an inordinate amount of my free time watching Japanese sushi slicers, guitar neck resetters, jet fighters and restorations of rusty mangles on YouTube, so it strikes me as odd that I have such a powerful aversion to watching cooks prepare a recipe that I want to make. Why? It’s partly pragmatic, because most of these online cooks take so long to do stuff and to talk about it, compared to me just reading the ingredient list. And it’s partly because so many of these cooks are intensely irritating. But it’s also something more fundamental than that.
The difference between a still photo and a video runs ontologically deep. A still photo does something that’s otherwise impossible: it stops time. This is something your living eyes and brain refuse to do.
That’s not all a photo does, however. Unless you’re a superb professional photographer, it’s your camera rather than you that decides most of what goes into a picture. Certainly you decided this was a scene or moment that you want to record and remember, but most likely there were only a couple of objects in it that sparked your interest, and much of the background detail will escape your notice until later.
Video is entirely different, behaving more or less exactly like your eye and sharing its inability to stop time. When you’re videoing, you’re capturing a continuation of your ongoing perception. A still photo represents what’s strictly in the past, while video in effect makes past events present again. T
he great photographic artists all took pictures in black and white mainly because colour film hadn’t been invented or was poor back then, but there’s a sense in which it was also right: the past ought to be monochrome, because colour belongs to the living present. That’s why most people under 30 find it hard work watching black and white movies, and why Hollywood was prepared to spend big bucks to colourise some of the classics.
YouTube videos don’t just show us a resumed present but also their author, whose voice and ego are on display. A still photograph makes no comment apart from its manifest content: it’s the camera, not the author, saying “here’s the stuff that was in front of my lens when you pressed the button”. This quality of impartial historical commentary becomes increasingly desirable as our world becomes more and more swamped by 3D-animated and CGI deepfaked video.
Hence the excitement when a large cache of old photographs is discovered, which is what happened with Vivian Maier’s Chicago street photos and similar finds in Aberdeen and Hackney. We somehow feel that such pictures are less-tainted testimonials to the past (not true, of course, because they represent just one person’s choice of what to record).
Anyway, perhaps the real reason I prefer still recipes over YouTube videos is that I really don’t want someone else’s opinion or experience of a dish, simply its bare, unvarnished facts so I can interpret them in the way I want. This preference extends to my taking of pictures: I’ve never been interested in shooting video (although I do enjoy hacking together GIFs from sequences of still images), but I’ve been capturing still photos for almost half a century. I bought my first proper camera, a Yashica TL-Electro, back in 1972 and my first pocket camera, a half-frame Canon Dial with its clever built-in clockwork motor drive, soon after. O
ver the years, I’ve been through quite a few pocket cameras – a Sony DSC-WX350 being the latest – but I had never succumbed to shooting with a smartphone until a couple of weeks ago. I’d clung on to an old HTC Desire phone with a dismal camera for as long as I could, but last week I bought a Moto Power. The quality of its cameras and flash impressed me, so off I trotted to the park to take some pictures of the spring blossom.
Back home, my pictures looked odd and behaved even more oddly, until I realised that they were all actually videos. Those tiny icons for still and video are right next to one another, and in bright sunlight without my specs on… well, you get the picture.