Visualizing the Untranslateable

Abstract

One may be forgiven for considering photography and cinema as comfortable fellow travellers along the same road sharing the technological genealogy of pictorial realism. However, despite many mechanical and optochemical similarities they have significantly distinct technological archaeologies which separate their history, form, style, and aesthetics in a way that can crucially impact on how we think about beauty. For example, although there were many precedents for projected moving images before 1895, in 1995 there was a general acceptance among film historians that, despite these competing claims, we had reached the centenary of cinema.