I’ve been reading a lot about the history of photography recently and I was delighted to discover that my Zoom portraits have a historical precedent. Kim Beil’s book Good Pictures has a whole chapter on television pictures. Apparently, in the 1950s, as TV sets were becoming more common, people started making images by photographing the screen. This gave anyone with a television, the chance to photograph events and people far from home. Popular Science Magazine gave advice on the best way to capture images in this way and ran a competition for its readers.
Since the 1950s several artists have pursued the idea. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Thomas Barrow photographed reflected TV screens in his series “The Television Montages”. In 1970 Mary Nickerson photographed the Apollo 13 splashdown via her TV. One of my favourites of the genre is Robert Heinecken’s 1987 piece Mr President..Mr President which takes TV footage of Ronald Reagan and combines it with subtitles. His portrait of TV anchor Connie Chung uses cameraless techniques to capture an image from the screen. About the same time, artist Allan McCollum photographed pictures on the set of situation comedies and soap operas. He then enlarged them, creating abstract images which he felt were more powerful that the source material.
I am sure that the pandemic will have inspired much more art to be made via the screen. I have spotted a couple of other photographers working this way, such as Tim Dunk and James Hole and I look forward to discovering more.
I have also discovered something more about the process of using a digital camera to photograph a computer screen. I have always chosen to capture my Zoom portraits this way because I like the additional artefacts that are introduced to the image. I felt they added depth, interest and texture and I did not want to hide the fact that digital layer upon digital layer was being used to create the pictures. What I did not know was why the curved lines or a grid appear. It turns out that something rather cool is occuring. Both the screen of my computer and the sensor on my camera are made up of pixel grids. When the two grids interact, you get optical effects called moiré. I now like them even more as they are a clear demonstration of the remote and digital nature of the image making.
As you can probably tell, I am still enthusiastic about the possibilities of making more portraits using video chat platforms, even when the pandemic is done (and may that be soon). I’ve realised that for many people this way of communicating has made things so much more accessible. For me, it has made it possible to photograph people on the other side of the world, while still being able to care for my family. For others, it might be making it to a meeting or a conference or a course that they otherwise would have had to miss. I’m actually pretty excited about this going forward and think that we can achieve a lot this way, and maybe do a bit less damage to the planet in the process.