Film and the Photographic Imaginary: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Still and Moving Image Relations
This course introduces students to a broad range of reflections on the relation between still photography and the cinema, as distinct mediums with connected histories, and as mutually productive and constitutive aesthetic imaginaries. While understandings of cinema as a moving image medium have some intuitive legibility, varied conceptions of photography (as material token, as technical practice, as event, as virtual entailment in all acts of visualization) significantly complicate the relation between the still and the moving image. What results is an extremely productive but complex set of paradigms for considering photo-film relations.
The icon, the tableau, the closeup, the freeze frame, the pose, and the invariant visions of the long take -- these have been some figures that have emerged in film aesthetics and in film criticism by attending to stillness in the cinema, traversing divergent modes of film practice, from commercial cinema in Hollywood/Bollywood to art cinema around the world.
A different, perhaps more literal approach might thematize photography as a presence in the movies, looking through movies in which still photographs and photographic practices are narratively central to the plot. Correspondingly, art photographers such as Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan), Jeff Wall (Canada), Cindy Sherman (US), and N. Pushpamala (India) have all found cinema central to their visions at one point or another.
A third direction can be understood from the vantage point of photographic criticism: the attention has run the other way, searching for a cinematic imaginary in the still image, whether by attending to proto-cinematic seriality (from chronophotography to the photo-essayistic work of Robert Frank or commercial photo-romans) or by examining the emergence of new and blurred registrations of time in photojournalism as still photographers explored how to see cinematically.
Finally, we might consider the extent to which digital imaging obsolesces our customary understandings of the distinctive nature of the two mediums, and what aesthetic possibilities emerge as a result.
This four-fold organization of a field of reflection could surely accommodate still other approaches. For instance, film publicity remains an under-explored field for the exploration of the aesthetic relation between cinema (as commodity) and photography (as image). Reception cultures and film practices in some national cinema traditions such as those in South Asia, can seem either indifferent to or agnostic regarding technical distinctions between film and photography or to the modernity of media, treating the projected photographic image as a window into longstanding and millennium-long performance idioms that predate still photography as well as the moving image.
Our focus in the seminar is on aesthetics, accomplished through close readings of movies and images. Students should treat this seminar as an occasion to acquire knowledge of a field of inquiry in the discipline of film and media studies. Course work will include leading/participating in structured discussion sessions, generating two documents of written research: one, an annotated bibliography that supplements course readings in a selected topic, and the second, a term-end paper that undertakes close analysis of a text or a set of texts while situating that analysis within a scholarly framework.
Professor: Sudhir Mahadevan (sudhirm@uw.edu)
Posted: 10/18/2025
Draft; details on required coursework subject to revision.