elective cinema

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town:

[I]n the cyclorama you’d have to choose which section of the screen to watch. Ross pointed to the parapet of the Belvedere Castle, a couple of hundred yards away, and said, “Imagine if you could go over there and see, say, a murder, or two people falling in love—or have multiple narratives going on at once.”

This is one of the things that attracts me to pinhole photography or any kind of photography with extreme depth of field: the idea of everything in the frame being in focus, edge to edge, top to bottom, allows the viewer to choose what they want to focus their attention on, rather than the photographer choosing it for them. It has its own limitations, of course, but with the right subject it can a great way to communicate.

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