13
CHAPTER 2
Five Stories to a Model of Video
Structure
2.1 STORY ONE: MIRROR WITH A MEMORY
2.1.1 JUST WHAT IS A PHOTOGRAPH?
Since a moving picture document is a set of still photographs, we want to consider in some depth
just what sort of document a photograph is. In 2009, we were working on a project with imaging
engineer Ethan O’Connor for a presentation on ultra-high resolution photography of museum
objects; we constructed the following considerations and model. Note that it was Ethan who com-
mented: “All of photography can be summed up as photons in, photons out.”
In June of 1859, physician, essayist, and photographer
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1859) (pictured at the right) wrote
in the Atlantic Monthly that photography provided humans
a “mirror with a memory.” We could have direct, indexical
representations of the world about us that would remain xed
across space and time. We have 5,000 years of practice think-
ing with words but scarcely a century and a half of practice
thinking with pictures, both still and moving. Now that the
means of production and viewing are simple and controllable,
we nd ourselves able to practice new ways of thinking in,
with, and about video. Plato argued that words were useful be-
cause they were stripped of specicity; Holmes argued (as do
we) that images are useful precisely because of their specicity.
Videos return us to the specicity of lived life.
Let us consider pictures. Or, rather, let us consider pho-
tography. Or, perhaps more usefully, let us consider acts that
we characterize as photography. We assert: Photography = Light goes in, then Light comes out.
More specically, information about the photons present in a region of space and region of time is
in some way carried through time or space and allowed to “live again” in a manner that exceeds our
expectations for how light behaves when it is not manipulated.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1859
14 2. FIVE STORIES TO A MODEL OF VIDEO STRUCTURE
So, what traits does a photon have? Direction of travel, location, wavelength (polarity too…),
intensity/ux, and its variation with time and space. e manner in which these characteristics are
mapped from the input photons and light volume to the output photons and light volume encom-
passes the entirety of photography.
If we think about photons, we realize that they come from some place at some time and in
the making of a photograph they (or their lineage) present a past state of aairs. We might then
propose that photographs and perhaps documents in general are mechanisms that resolve the past
or predict the future in a universe that makes both acts seemingly impossible.
Another way to think of a document is to ask what sort of resolving power does a document
aord one in determining a past state? A photographic document presents a means of recovering
the vector state of the past that is more useful—enables a closer mapping—in some situations.
ere exists the possibility of recovering from the initial les, the temporal, spatial, and spectral
component(s) of some State 1 from the State 2 represented in the photograph. As one possible
example, consider the word “greave.” For most people today this is not a suciently common entity
in daily life for the single word to bring to mind or use, say, the three-dimensional shape of the
entity. Even a passage from Homer may not be sucient to do so:
As he spoke his strong hand hurled his javelin from him, and the spear struck Achilles on the
leg beneath the knee; the greave (κνημίς) of newly wrought tin rang loudly, but the spear
recoiled from the body of him whom it had struck, and did not pierce it, for the gods gift stayed
it. (616).
Homer, e Iliad (ed. Samuel Butler) book 21, line 590.
It would perhaps make more sense for the modern reader to use the translation “shin guard.”
A standard two-dimensional photograph may present a closer mapping between the doc-
ument and the original entity or state. Stereographs from the nineteenth century and various
three-dimensional imaging systems today are capable of even closer mapping between State 1 and
State 2. ere is, of course, a wrinkle in our representation. e photograph is not from the time of
Homer; rather, it is from a modern reproduction of a Homeric tale. e greaves in the movie were
constructed by one-to-one mapping from ancient greaves to modern reproductions—in themselves,
then, a form of document.
We have photographs of gullies on Mars. Gullies on Mars are not coded by humans. ey
exist as the result of laws of physics operating over time. Humans participate in coding by lens
design, sensor design, transmission system design, and target selection. Photographs of gullies on
Mars are like snapshots of a birthday party—both record surface structures for future use.
A photograph made of a buttery on a planet in the Vega star system would not be a doc-
ument on Earth because it would be too far away to interact with an entity on Earth. Even if
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