Entertainment with a Human Face
David Strick
Redux
Hollywood is constantly covered by still photography, but rarely uncovered. Photographers have worked on sets from the beginning of movie history, but they usually serve as extensions of the publicity apparatus rather than as independent critical observers. One hundred and thirteen years after the invention of the first practical movie camera, there are now libraries full of film theory and television criticism, warehouses full of fan magazines, television shows about moviemaking and films about television, but by comparison still photography, despite its privileged position at the center of this universe, has added almost nothing insightful to our understanding of the subject. Documentary photography, as the most serious arm of the photographic medium, may seem unsuited to examine something as apparently unserious as media culture, but by neglecting to try very hard, it has basically ceded a significant part of our social and cultural history to the somewhat less thoughtful attentions of advertisers, portraitists, and fans.
Preview
What has gone missing as a result is the reality of this huge unreality, and in a sense perhaps that’s poetically perfect, since no one can claim that reality, let alone Hollywood reality, is easily definable. But the filmed entertainments of movies and television are so culturally dominant that one can’t help but think they deserve to be represented by more than just the echoes of their own promotion. In the same sense that war is said to be too important to be left to the generals, Hollywood is too significant to be left to the publicists.
With over a century of catching-up to do, the photographs I’ve made on the sets of large and small films, music videos, adult films and television may have arrived too late to be considered more than a momentary disturbance of somebody else’s discussion.
However at this point, perhaps even a pause has its uses, so I hope you will allow my interruption to continue.
