Images In Sequence

Photography is still a young medium. Exactly what this means in terms of the quality we should expect from it is uncertain: It was never really possible for anyone to say that literature or painting was young, nor can we compare the early products of those arts with those of forms which grew up suddenly out of inventions-still photography, film, television. One thing, perhaps the only things, that means is that the most radical developments are still being made.

Which brings us to an example of one of those developments in progress: a set of photo sequences by Kelly Wise now being shown, along with a group of photographs by Aaron Siskind, at the Fogg.

The photo sequence involves putting together two or more prints into a whole which exhibits some sort of progression. It is often a narrative progression, but the parts may also be linked by development in form or subject matter. Although bordering on the usually journalistic photo essay, the sequence is such a simple idea that it is amazing that only within the past few years has it begun to be explored and realized.

Wise, who teaches English at Andover, says that he was led to sequences through his work with film--and that seems to be the source of his problems. Film is, understandably, closely linked to the sequence. Eadweard Muybridge, whose photographs of animal locomotion were the first that could be termed sequences, was simply trying to do what film could before film had been invented. And the montage techniques which the sequence employs have no more important source than Eisenstein's pioncer writings on film.

Both sequence and film work in the gaps between juxtaposed images. But because the defining feature of film is the moving camera, the photographer who conceives an incident as film is likely to run into problems in converting it into a series of stills. This is what happens to Wise: all top often his sequences fail to set up the necessary tension between frames and break down into images of no clear connection. Anyone who has seen stills taken from successive film cuts can imagine the kind of loss which is suffered.

Some of Wise's sequences rely on what are apparently family relations between people in the various shots, but just how they are related is distractingly unclear. In several cases where the direction of the sequence is intentionally left uncertain the effect is confusion rather than ambiguity. His finest product ties together several frames of a woman and child getting up in the morning with bars of morning sunlight but in general one has to be skeptical of Wise's posted statement that he united the sequences through "formal relations and through the structure of narrative, myth, and ritual."

The source of the problem--and of the sequence's effectiveness--lies in what is different from film. The moments which sequences show best are too brief to be approciated in the rush of the motion picture; when frozen and separated they reveal a movement that is more delicate and complex. Sequences have something to teach about film itself: how each shot can be composed to lead into the next.

One sign of the sequence's new importance is found in the fact that last year the internationally prestigious photography magazine, Camera, devoted two special issues to the genre. Photography, probably just because it appears to reproduce reality, has always been able to create the grotesque and surreal, and these issues demonstrated that the sequence was particularly well suited to creating fantastic moments out of a series of everyday images. One of the earliest practitioners of the sequence, Duane Michaels, uses eight frames in one of his works to show a young girl coming into a room and climbing into cardboard carton, which then floats out of the frame, and apparently right through the ceiling.

The result is a whimsical, slightly frightening caricature of reality. But even more striking is the kind of caricature used in a two-frame sequence by Eve Sonneman, whose work attracted the interest of Diane Arbus. The first of these frames shows the head and left side of a man rowing a small boat, watching another boat approaching from behind. The second frame, right beside it, shows only the man's right shoulder, arm and bar, but in the background the second boat has now passed by. The eye leaps the frame, unites the two sides of the man's body and ends up two contradictory moments expressed in the positions of the background boat.

Techniques like this speak the language of the comic strip as much as that of film. A forthcoming book by Francis Lacassin (excerpted in Film Quarterly, Fall, '72) shows how comics contributed many of the elements of film syntax which the sequence has now adopted. Subtle choices of angle of view, depth of field, movements within the composition of each frame, use of the "subjective camera" to pick out important details-all these make up a language which comic strips were using before the development of motion pictures. That film continues to borrow and share these elements is indicated by directors liked Alfred Hitchcock, who sketches out every shot of his films in cartoon style before shooting begins, or Alain Resnais, who has admitted the influence of the comic strip Mandrake the Magician in the making of such innovative films as Last Year at Maricubad. Sequences use the same language a fantastic ambiguity that transcends what seems "just reality."

Although Wise's sequences are for the must part carefully possed and shot-many of the individual frames are sensitive and considered views of individuals-other photographers have attempted to incorporate accident into the order of the sequence. Use of the motor-advanced still camera or film frames enables the photographer to chose the exact moments he wants to combine, Bringing this tendency to its extreme. Pierre Cordier (whose work was featured in a show at the Fogg in 1971) allows chemicals to form patterns directly on unexposed film, and calls the series of abstract images that result "chimigrammes."

All of which represents a photographic genre that is just beginning to discover its possibilities, and of which the Kelly Wise exhibit is a fair if not brilliant example. That almost all the photographers best known for sequnces are in their twenties or thirties promises more and better in store.