Photography, for me, makes the most sense when it is thought of as an art that extends from the universal human eye. It is of course a way of seeing, both literal in its capture of an image via light and metaphorical in its meaning which depends on individual perspectives. What I took away most from reading "Photography's Expanded Field" by George Baker was thinking of photography's placement between extremes, and the tension and ambiguity that is created in so doing. For example, the reading set up the extremes of stasis vs. motion, and how those dichotomies at first correlate to photography and cinema, but once "film stills" and "still films" are introduced each genre is expanded. Perhaps I enjoyed thinking about this spectrum because I am currently enrolled in both Expanded Photography and Introduction to Video Art; I am looking forward to exploring how my previous exposure to photography will help inform my foray into video and discovering more about how the two mediums relate to one another. Additionally, thinking back to the human eye, our vision records fluid continuous visual information (like video?), yet memory for me is often encapsulated in frozen images. This I think perhaps explains my initial inclination to describe photography as the capture of moments in time (be they real or imagined.)
Here's a "film still" from a video I produced with my best friend in high school. While the image is "hidden" in the video footage indiscernible to naked eye, it captures the energy of the day and the fun we remember. It is simultaneously "still," yet charged with memories and explicit meaning of motion.
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