Dick Pountain /Idealog 321/ 09 Apr 2021 01:58
I like to cook, and although I have two whole shelves-full of cookery books, digital sloth dictates that nowadays I tend to go online and Google for a recipe rather than trying to find one there. Googling ‘pork mushrooms kimchi’ will get me hundreds of matches. But once I click on a promising candidate, if it takes me to a video on YouTube I’ll back out sharply and try the next, until I find one that’s just a still photograph and a text recipe.
I spend an inordinate amount of my free time watching Japanese sushi slicers, guitar neck resetters, jet fighters and restorations of rusty mangles on YouTube, so it strikes me as odd that I have such a powerful aversion to watching cooks performing a recipe that I want to do. Why is it? It’s only partly pragmatic, because most of these online cooks take so long to do stuff and to talk about it, compared to me just reading an ingredient list. And it’s only partly because so many of these cooks are intensely irritating (indeed a few of them are quite cute). No, it’s something more fundamental than that, and I felt a column coming on…
The difference between a still photograph and a video runs ontologically deep. A still photograph does something that’s otherwise impossible, namely it stops time, which your living eyes and brain refuse to do. That’s not all it does though: unless you’re a superb professional photographer, it’s your camera rather than you that decides most of what goes into a picture. Certainly you decided this was a scene or moment that you want to record and remember, but most likely it was only a couple of objects in it that sparked your interest, and much of the background detail will escape notice until later. Video is entirely different, behaving more or less exactly like your eye and sharing its inability to stop time: when you’re videoing you’re capturing a continuation of your ongoing perception. A still photo represents what’s strictly in the past, while video in effect makes past events present again.
The great art photographers all took pictures in black and white mainly because colour film wasn’t invented or was so poor back then, but there’s a sense in which it was also right: the past ought to be monochrome because colour belongs to the living present. That’s why most kids under 30 find it hard work watching black and white movies, and why Hollywood is prepared to spend big bucks to colourise some of the classics.
YouTube videos don’t just show us a resumed present but also their author, whose voice and ego are on display. A still photograph makes no comment apart from its manifest content: it’s the camera, not the author, saying ‘here’s the stuff that was in front of my lens when you pressed the button’. This quality of impartial historical commentary becomes increasingly desirable as our world becomes more and more swamped by 3D-animated, CGI-fied, deep-faked video. Hence the excitement when a large cache of old photographs is discovered, as happened with Vivian Maier’s Chicago street photographs and similar finds in Aberdeen and Hackney. We somehow feel that such pictures are less-tainted testimonials to the past (not true of course because they represent just one person’s choice of what to record).
Anyway, perhaps why I prefer still recipes over YouTube videos is that I really don’t want someone else’s opinion or experience of a dish, simply its bare, unvarnished facts so I can interpret them in the way I want. And this preference extends to my taking of pictures too: I’ve never been interested in shooting video (though I do enjoy hacking together GIFs from sequences of still images). I’ve been taking still photos for quite a long time: I got my first proper camera, a Yashica TL-Electro back in 1972 and my first pocket camera, a Canon Dial (half-frame, with clever built-in clockwork motordrive) soon after.
Over the years I’ve been through quite a few pocket cameras - a Sony WX350 being the latest - but I’ve never succumbed to shooting with a smartphone until a couple of weeks ago. I’d clung on to an old HTC Desire phone with a crappy camera for as long as I could, but last week I couldn’t, so I bought me a new Moto Power. The quality of its cameras and flash impressed me, so off I trot to the park to take some pix of the Spring blossom. Back home the pictures looked odd and behaved even more oddly, until I realised that they were all actually videos. Those tiny icons for still and video are right next to one another, and in bright sunlight without my specs on…
[Dick Pountain does not possess a selfie stick]
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