Stills with stories
Most of the photographers I’ve spoken to for this series have said that one of their principal aims is to convey some sense of emotion in their pictures. Their use of film is a key ingredient, but so too are colour, and the expression and body language of the person being photographed. In still photography we have to work quite hard to push our meaning, or the brave choose to leave the meaning open to the imagination of the viewer. However hard we promote our ideas in our pictures we are, to some extent, reliant on the viewer picking up the signals, markers and hints that we lay out for them. If they miss those hints they may come to a conclusion wholly different to that which we hoped. Sometimes that matters, and other times it doesn’t.
In the cinema the same principles are applied to make the audience feel the way the director wants them to or to help them understand how the subject is feeling. The moving image however has the additional benefits of sound, music, subject movement and the movement of the camera to influence how the message is delivered. In fact, with all these tools to hand, when they are used well, the captive audience can hardly fail to get the message, whether it’s a building sense of terror accompanied by pulsing baseline strings or a woodwind moment of airy romance bathed in a golden light.
Somewhere between stills and the movies sits the photography of Lazar Bogdanovic, a cinematographer from Belgrade who has a passion for 35mm film and his
