Keep still, can moving pictures ever tell the full story?

Over the decades the talk has been about how television and all its trappings, are sounding the death knell for photography

August 19, 1839 is the day Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, Joseph Nicephere Niepec and Henry Fox Talbot are credited with ‘discovering’ photography. They would have borne a perplexed look had you told them then that their innovation would lead to motion pictures, courtesy Frenchman Louis Lumiere, aptly nicknamed Cinematographe.

Lumiere’s pathbreaking invention debuted in 1895, but even if you subscribe to the view that it was Edison, rather than Lumiere who invented the motion picture, you can’t deny that without still photography, movies would have been but a glint in a producer’s eye.

Enough with the history lesson, and down to some fighting talk. Over the decades the talk has been about how television and all its trappings, are sounding the death knell for photography. But proponents of that theory forget one niggling factor, that photographers have virtually no margin for error. And out of a lack of margin, often comes excellence. The ability to capture a scene or an emotion in one frame is not one to be taken lightly.

Take for instance the Godra riots. Although TV channels beamed graphic images 24x7 into living rooms across the country, it was the photograph by Arko Dutta, of a man with folded hands, blood-stained shirt and tears welling in his eyes that captured the world’s imagination and struck a blow that rocked our moral turpitude. In 2005, Arko, incidentally won the WPP award for his picture of a tsunami survivor weeping by a dead relative on a beach in Cuddalore.

In the modern era the intense competitiveness between the TV cameraman and the photographer has increased manifold with both vying for better space and an insight into the human condition

In the modern era the intense competitiveness between the TV cameraman and the photographer has increased manifold with both vying for better space and an insight into the human condition. A TV cameraman’s job is more strenuous than that of a print photographer in that his images have to follow the reporter’s thread, and at times have to tell a story on their own. Print photographers have to be more aesthetic, constantly looking to capture passion and emotion. Photographers, however, must remember that their image have a much longer shelf-life, and hence to be qualitatively superior in all respects.

Talking of photographic longevity, Spencer Platt’s photograph for Getty of a convertible full of gorgeous Lebanese women, dressed to the nines, driving through a bombed-out Beirut suburb, told a million tales, that are etched into the consciousness of all those who had the pleasure of seeing it.

The argument between still and moving, however, will be one that rages for many more years. You, the reader, shall be the final judge.