The myth of objectivity
When I read
Bazin’s statement it reads like someone who has fallen in love. It’s
optimistic, it looks past all the flaws and faults and finds the positive. The
main positive, the positive that existed in 1945 more so than today. If we look
at the number of images Bazin took in 1945 versus the 35 images per second that
digital cameras can take today it was more considered the photographers had to
take their time to compose the image and take it, they could not move the
camera around the scene as easily as we can today. So there may have been a
sense that what photographers took were more real than the images today, each
image had to be though through.
But at the same time what Bazin does not mention is the ability to frame a subject and its surroundings and by doing so change the context of the image. An image of a single woman standing in a doorway has a very different meaning to the same woman standing in the same doorway with two children in tattered clothing around her. So by the simple act of capturing a moment in time even down to the moment that photographer presses the button (are they blinking, are they looking down are their hair a mess) is an act of selection and curation. In modern day photography we can shoot a multitude of frames and pick the best but it is no different to the two or three images that photographers had at the time of Bazin, the selection process of what to capture in the frame remains the same.