Unfolding the In-between Image The Emergence of an Incipient Image at the Intersection of Still and Moving Images

As digital technology has transformed various aspects of our screen culture over the past few decades, we have been witnessing a disappearing boundary between photographic still images and cinematic moving images. An emerging in-between image has become increasingly prominent in this new image culture, which attempts to negotiate the grey area between stillness and movement. This in-between image, manifest in a variety of formats and media, points to an increasingly solid middle ground between the traditional divisions of still and moving images. This paper builds a conceptual framework for analysing this new type of image and explores both the roots of this emergent category before focusing on its contemporary trajectory as exemplified by the work of Adad Hannah, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, and James Nares.


Unfolding the In-between Image
The Emergence of an Incipient Image at the Intersection of Still and Moving Images Masaki Kondo temporality of the still image thus underscores the photographic image's intensity as the crucial factor of its aesthetics.
The film theorist Peter Wollen eloquently describes these temporal characteristics of the still image.In "Fire and Ice" (1984), Wollen maintains that the still image lacks tense and indicates only the aspect of the event, action, or situation depicted in it.Wollen explains the difference between tense and aspect as follows: "While 'tense' locates an event in time in relation to the present moment of speech, 'aspect' represents its internal temporal structure."2 By foregrounding aspect over tense, the still image represents the inertial state of what it depicts, or an inceptive instance of duration, independent from our inclination to rely on narrative.
In contrast to the still image's intensity, the moving image derives its aesthetic momentum through its extensivity: it constantly evolves through image sequences over a fixed duration of its appearance and disappearance.If we pause the moving image at any given moment, we recognize the aspect of the moving image at that moment when such an image becomes a still image.The moving image is, however, imbricating this aspect in its temporal continuity and extending the intensity of some aspect in order to inscribe tense in it.In this sense, the still and moving images reside in a reciprocal relationship.The still image at a given moment contracts the captured moment into potential and its intensity expands through an unfixed duration of viewing; the moving image extends the moment's potential, some of which amplifies during a fixed duration of viewing.
This characterization of the still and the moving image echoes film theorist Christian Metz's distinction between photography and film as outlined in his essay " Photography and Fetish" (1985).Here Metz concludes in opaque Freudian terms: "film is more capable of playing on fetishism, photography more capable of itself becoming a fetish."3David Campany, a London-based writer, artist, and curator, clarifies and reaffirms Metz's characterization of this relation between these two image-based art forms.He explains that the fixed materiality of a photograph allows it to become a fetish and "stand in for the absent subject or moment" while the intangible projection of film orchestrates "the viewer's desire through the fullness of its unfolding" in the form of voyeurism. 4Since the moment of capture always takes place in the past, our fetishized obsession with any of the still image's elements does not return anything but a further longing for contact.The more we see the object of our obsession, the longer we want to hold such a view both with our eyes and our imagination.This obsession with the still image validates the effect of the image's intensity and promotes a desirably indefinite duration of viewing.In contrast to the still image's fixity, the moving image's fluidity can more effectively engender a sense of voyeurism, which Metz recognizes as the effect of "the constant and teasing displacement of the cutting line which separates the seen from the unseen."5Film as a moving image comes into existence only during the duration of our viewing since we perceive its movement, static or dynamic, through an intermittent succession of still images.The moving image's virtuality, or lack of physicality, uncovers the immanence of such movement within itself.The moving image as an ephemeral phenomenon urges us not to miss anything presented on and through the screen by extending our expectations to something unforeseen in the virtual unfolding of the moving image at the present moment.
Although the intensity of photographic images pertains to the past and the extensivity of cinematic images to the present, the objects themselves are missing from both types of images.The objects depicted in the still image exist in the past but they cannot exist in the present as they did at the moment of capture.The objects that emerge in the moving image maintain their existence only in the duration of its virtual continuity from the past through the present to the future but not at any single moment in this temporal continuity.
We can recognize this reciprocality of still and moving images-of their intensive and extensive durations or of their objects of fetish and voyeurism-in Hiroshi Sugimoto's Movie Theaters   firmly implied, in each of these videos time itself becomes a crucial element, the live image negating the imagined before and after, insisting on the live/lived present.It is within this uneasy space between movement and stillness, the recorded and the live, that I hope to open up a space for viewers to take an active role in the generation of meaning-a meaning that is formed relationally between viewer and artwork.9 As Hannah attempts to stretch out the essence of photography, or the still image's intensity, toward the domain of video, his use of tableaux vivants reveal the domain of the in-between image as the "uneasy space between movement and stillness, the recorded and the live." 10 Sugimoto's Union City Drive, Union City foregrounds an aesthetic difference between film and photography but his practice remains in the traditional domain of photography.In contrast, Hannah engages with the grey area in the reciprocality between the still and moving images.
Through this critical engagement, he attempts to establish the in-between image through a Hegelian sense of sublation, or the process wherein opposing or contradictory elements lose their independence from one another and become "mere 'moments' of a unity," while preserving the essence of the indeterminate state at the transcendental level. 11Furthermore, the integration of tableaux vivants, which became a mode of popular entertainment in the nineteenth century, adds another twist in the pursuit of the in-between image in Hannah's work.
Hannah's creative endeavour negotiates the space between movement and stillness, which also proved essential for earlier tableaux vivants.Art historian Steven Jacobs traces the emergence of tabealux vivants as an artistic practice back to the eighteenth-century French philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot's writings on theatre.Diderot recognized tableaux vivants as dramaturgy that could supersede coup de théâtre, or a sudden turn of event in a play.12Jacob explains that this use of tableaux vivants in theatre achieved the representation of "fixed moments that halt the narrative development of the story and introduce stasis into the movement of the play."13Identifying a similar attitude toward tableaux vivants in modernist cinema of the 1960s, Jacobs argues that modernist cinema's emphasis on the nature of temporality-particularly stillness and slowness-echoes the reviving fascination for tableaux vivants at that time."self-reflexivity to their medium specificity.Jacobs, however, asserts that tableaux vivants and cinema "were difficult to reconcile with a modernist aesthetic of self-investigation based on the idea of the essence and purity of a specific medium" due to the nature of their hybridity and heterogeneity. 16Along with direct engagements with stillness and movement, tableaux vivants now have the potential to supersede modernist aesthetics through their hybridity.
In  The appropriation art of the late 1970s involved a re-engagement with Pop via the deadpan repetition of Minimalism . . .By contrast Wall, when he draws on a preceding work, does not rephotograph or copy it, but rather reconstructs it, using the original not as the source for a reproduction, but rather as a model.Wall's oft-cited A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) (1993) is a digital assemblage of dozens of images, and its production process involved a magnitude of film production techniques to control all of the aspects of mise-en-scène from actors to props and lighting to wind.This seamlessly assembled image captures the moment when the wind scatters sheets of paper.Campany, however, contends that Wall's improbably perfected image does not conform to our sense of photographic realism: Wind animates Wall's picture at a level more conceptual than actual.It captures an idea, not a sudden gust.Moreover, there is an improbable perfection in Wall's picture.The bleak setting on the dirt ground cannot quite anchor its realism.It is as if photographic arrestedness, so in thrall to the decisive moment as a "slice of life," demands imperfection somewhere.Perhaps Wall's perfectionism is its own deliberate undoing, allowing the viewer an entry point. 23  The sense of idealistic perfection felt in this work, nevertheless, embodies what Wall has been working on since the mid-1970s in order to revolutionize our sense of photographic image.
Being aware of the constructed-ness in this photographic tableau, we are struck by the oddity of wind as part of this tableau vivant.As Sugimoto's Union City Drive, Union City reveals the still image's inability to capture the movement existing within the duration of the moving image, wind physically, aesthetically, and conceptually escapes the image.The conceptualized existence of wind in Wall's photographic tableau, therefore, underpins the still image's capacity to contract the movement of wind and to evoke our obsession with the streak of scattered sheets of paper as the trace of the wind.Furthermore, this conceptualized wind highlights the proclivity of Wall's photographic tableau to represent something beyond (photographic) realism through its perfectly captured moment that in reality consists of dozens of images and moments.(2012).Unlike Wall's approach to photographic tableaux, Hannah creates tableaux vivants more directly by taking straight photographs of posed models in staged settings.In addition to the photographs, Hannah records the tableaux vivants in video and foregrounds the unconstructed aspect in the still images.This approach allows Hannah to produce the sense of authenticity in his works through its naturalistic depiction of scenes.The less constructed but more staged setting of these works highlight the theatrical reality of the depicted scenes in stark contrast to Wall's hyper-realistic images.
In order to explore this unstructured aspect in Hannah's images, I will focus on his The Russians series.This series evolved from his encounter with ordinary people on a trip to St.
Petersburg and its vicinities and it relies on contingent conditions of mise-en-scène more than his other series.Moreover, Hannah's use of non-professional models on location foregrounds the nature of unconstructed, uncontrolled situations and dialectically engages with the plasticity of digitally manipulated and constructed images.These production conditions of The Russians not only lend them the authenticity of documentary photography but also echoes the rawness observed in the actuality film from early cinema and in the Italian Neorealism movement of the late 1940s and the early 1950s.
Girl on a Balcony, a video from this series, shows a young woman with a ponytail standing on a balcony with her hands resting on the railing.From the given view, the balcony seems to be on a high floor.Despite her attempt to remain still, her hair waves in breeze; the upper body moves up and down as she breathes; she blinks frequently; the shade inside the balcony gradually shifts; and the trees in the background sway.If we see this situation as unfold in a tableau vivant or in reality, we may not pay particular attention to these subtle movements but rather focus on the entirety of the situation.Seeing them within this moving image on a static screen, however, our sensitivity to movement heightens and we start to perceive the vitality contained in even such ordinary scenes.The curatorial statement accompanying the exhibition of this series explains: "Somewhat less controlled than his previous videos, Hannah's subjects pulse with life even as they try to remain still."24Indeed, the high-definition video of this tableau vivant by amateur models intensifies our sense, and even desire, to feel the pulsation that the young woman generates, experiences, and coexists with through the duration captured in the video.With this enhanced sense of the pulsation of vitality and energy, we can relive the duration experienced by the young woman and captured in the video.
The vital pulsation revealed in Girl on a Balcony becomes more obvious in the video of Russian Woman at Home and the corresponding still image of Old Woman Looking out Window.
In both of these images, we see the same elderly woman sitting in a domestic interior.The room has a Persian rug on one wall and a yellow and green checkered blanket in front of it.The woman is sitting on a couch covered by the blanket.In the still image, the camera is facing straight into the rug-covered wall and is sharply focusing on the elderly woman, who is on the right side of the frame.While the vivid colours of the blanket and rug contrast with the tranquil colours of the woman's shirt and skirt, we may pay particular attention to her complexion and imagine the life that she has lived.We may also notice the stuffed animals sitting on top of the couch and against the rug-covered wall.Their existence may lead us to believe that she lives with her grandchildren or that they visit her often.Here, we are experiencing the extending and unfolding of the image's intensity in the unfixed duration of our viewing: a narrative begins to emerge as our imagination works through the image's given context.
While we likely go through a similar interpretative process with the video Russian Woman at Home, we attend to every moment of the duration captured in this work.Here the camera angle shifts to one corner of the room with the rug-covered wall seen in the still image on the left side and the elderly woman is slightly off centre of the frame.Like in Girl on a Balcony, we notice the woman's subtle body movements: posture changes, blinking, and the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes.The more body movements we become aware of, the more we focus on each moment of this imaginarily shared duration with the elderly woman, sensing the pulsation of her body.While watching the duration of her attempt to remain still as a tableau vivant, our sensation starts to synchronize with such duration, leading us to perceive the vital pulsation emerging from it.This condition eventually urges us to immerse ourselves in the shared duration so that we can join her in the same temporal dimension.
Hannah's The Russians series foregrounds our sensitivity to this vital pulsation through an intensified situation of individuals who are trying to remain as still as possible; this sensation of vital pulsation seems to be emerging from a heightened tension in the momentum between the still and the moving.This tension between stillness and movement in this series triggers our desire to reside in the duration captured in them through their relatively uncontrolled natural settings.Hannah achieves all these elements by maintaining the static relationship with the depicted space of the in-between image.
photographs. 17 photographic practices emerged out of the functional and documentary uses of photography in Conceptual art." 19 In this context, Newman identifies Wall's critical contribution to the formation of the post-conceptual, post-modernist art beyond the domain of Duchampian readymade at that time:

19
photo-conceptualism of the 1960s and 1970s "revolutionized our concept of the Picture and created the conditions for the restoration of that concept as a central category of contemporary art by around 1974." 21 Although he has exhibited a stronger attitude toward the opportunity to revolutionize the concept of Picture, or the historical context of image representation and depiction in Western culture, Wall shares with Hannah a curiosity to explore the vagueness of the emerging field of visual art in their respective eras.Wall endeavoured to open up the domain of pictorial possibilities and has established his cinematic style in photographic tableaux.Jacobs particularly emphasizes the constructed factor of Wall's work as cinematic.He explains: "Wall's works are cinematic in the way they deal with lighting, aspect ratio, mise-en-scène, and so forth.Presented as large-format transparencies on light boxes, adding to their cinematic effect, Wall's photographs are unmistakably constructed." 22Furthermore, the accessibility of digital technology and computer software has extended the scope of the constructed-ness in Wall's image work beyond pro-filmic reality and pre-shooting control.
photography as equivalent to traditional film photography.The pervasiveness of screen images in daily life along with the digital image's malleability has made us not only familiar with but even indifferent to these digitally constructed images.In the crisis of modernism, Wall brought photography and tableaux vivants together in order to establish the domain of the post-photographic image, but what are contemporary artists of the twenty-first century doing in order to build upon Wall's achievement?We can find one answer in Hannah's approach of bringing photographic tableaux and the moving image together to expose the constructed-ness of contemporary images and re-evaluate the power of unconstructed images.Several of Hannah's works combine still and moving images of highly constructed and stylized situations, such as The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House) (2009), A Vulgar Picture (2010), and Daydreams of the Drunken Scholar

While
Hannah exploits his professional and amateur models' attempted stillness in relation to stillness in photography in The Russians, Nares plays with the very verge of the moment when movement emerges from stillness in the streets.Some pedestrians notice the camera on the van and make acknowledging gestures toward it, but the majority of passers-by do not notice it.In the film, their actions unfold in a smooth and seemingly exaggerated manner.As Eadweard Muybridge's The Horse in Motion (1878) reveals the locomotion of a galloping horse, Nares' Street expands the duration of time inhabited by his subjects to foreground the unfolding moment of pedestrians' gestures in duration.Because of its depth of field and ability to maintain sharp focus while in motion, this high-definition video gives us a sense of three-dimensionality, which enhances the perceived vitality of the pedestrians.In Nares's video, we are seeing familiar gestures of pedestrians-crossing an intersection, standing in a street, talking on a phone, or waiting for a traffic signal to change.These familiar gestures, however, appear unusual and novel in Street as we perceive the moment when the intensity of these stilled gestural movements come into force.By sensing pedestrians' pulsation through their exaggerated gestures, we are experiencing the in-between image at the threshold of incipient movements from stillness in this video work.Both Hannah's and Nares's videos strategically underscore the vital pulsation of life through the grey area existing between the still and moving images by creating in-between images.By making use of tableaux vivants, Hannah's The Russians series stimulates our sensitivity and susceptivity to subtle gestures and movements within the attempted stillness of ordinary people in his moving image works.Subtle gestures and movements in Nares's Street, on the other hand, arise from the constant emergence of such gestural movements in an unfamiliar way through our curious observation of pedestrians in slow motion.Despite the different approaches these artists used to capture the tension between stillness and movement in the in-between image, they both guide our attention to the vital pulsation of people depicted in videos.By unfolding the emerging field of the in-between image, both artists encourage us to immerse ourselves in the present moment of viewing the videos, perceiving the energy of people, and occupying the duration of their existence in their surroundings with them.This focus on vital pulsation and shared temporality is unsurprisingly a common theme in contemporary art beyond the domain of the in-between image.As image-based media have shifted from the analogue to the digital, the digital saturation of contemporary society has immersed us in a life full of digital images.As we continue examining how new technologies are 27 Nares, "Free Lecture."28James Nares, "James Nares' Street, with a soundtrack by Thurston Moore, runs at the Wadsworth Atheneum," interview by Michael Hamad, CT.com, June 26, 2012, http://www.ct.com/entertainment/art/wtxx-james-nares-street-with-a-soundtrack-by-thurston-moore-run s-at-the-wadsworth-atheneum-20120626,0,3593912.story.
photography series.Here, Sugimoto created long-exposure photographs of movie theatres by setting up his camera at the back of their screen rooms and recording the theatrical space in single frames for the duration of an entire screening.As | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2014.80 ."15These aspects of heterogeneity and intermediality in tableaux vivants are an indication of forthcoming post-modernism and must have attracted Hannah to this art form.In the context of modernist art, the accentuated existence of hybridity can result in art forms' 14We can observe this preference for slowness as a way of resisting speed as the symbol of modernization in the 1960s avant-garde films, such as Andy Warhol's Empire(1964)and Michael Snow's Wavelength(1967).Like Jacobs, Brigitte Peucker, a scholar of German literature and film studies, traces the root of tableaux vivants within art back to Diderot, but she regards them as an early mode of hybridity in art: "Tableau vivant is a meeting point of several modes of representation, constituting a palimpsest or textual overlay simultaneously evocative of painting, drama, and 9 Adad Hannah, Artist's statement for "Two Mirrors," Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, accessed May 5, 2013, http://www.pfoac.com/fairs/loop08_EN.htm. 10Ibid. 11Stephen Houlgate, "Hegel Logic," in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed.Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 130. Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture http://contemporaneity.pitt.eduVol 3, No 1 (2014) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2014.80sculpture Jean-François Chevrier, "The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography," in The Last 20 15 Brigitte Peucker, "Filmic Tableau Vivant: Vermeer, Intermediality, and the Real," in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed.Ivone Margulies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 295. 16acobs, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts, 94. 17 Michael Fried, "Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday," Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 495-497, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/513524.18 New-York-based artist James Nares, however, shows a different way of approaching the in-between image in Street (2011).Instead of observing models who attempt to remain still as in Hannah's works, this video work by Nares moves around the streets of New York City with a high-speed camera.In a public lecture on Street at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Nares explained that his strong interest in the actuality film inspired this work.25Inthissense,Naresengageswiththe rawness of quotidian reality through the moving image from the very beginning, but Street achieves a stillness within movement through slow motion.In this work, he used a Phantom Flex high-speed camera, which can capture up to 1,455 frames per second at its highest resolution and up to 10,750 frames per second at its lowest resolution.26Naressixteenhours of footage of pedestrians in the streets of Manhattan by using a camera installed on a van that was moving at the speed of thirty to forty miles per hour, but the final sixty-one minute video clip uses only two-and-half minutes of actual time.27Whatparticularlyattracted Nares to the use of the Phantom Flex camera was its capacity to record for only six seconds at the frame rate that he was using.Agreeing that limitation of recording capacity led to his heightened sense to street contingency, he states, It's really like a collection of still photographs.But a still photograph that's just been nudged into motion, and so you see the photo, but you also see what just preceded it and what just came after it, and there's a little narrative there very often.28 Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture http://contemporaneity.pitt.eduVol 3, No 1 (2014) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2014.80recorded