Where I am now
From previous surveys, I comprehend that the term ‘cinematic’ have used ambiguously in photography in terms of definition and usage. Not only cinema is an integrated art which combined various art fields such as video, music and stories, but it has various presenting forms depending on each project. Size, Scale, Technical Method, Narrative, and Protagonist are important keywords which shape what cinema is. In addition, cinema, the whole new experience for people in the 20th Century, evokes a wide range of artistic or philosophical analysis.  
I have dozens upon dozens of books and documents awaiting to be read as I presented some of them on the PHO701 Research Project Proposal. I have read several books and documents between the last semester such as Jeff Wall : selected essays and interviews (Wall, 2007) and Cinema 2 (Deleuze, 1985). I am starting to get a vague image of the overall picture surrounding ‘cinematic’. However, I consider I must solidify the foundation by reading the essential literature of photography in the Informing and Context block foremost. One of the reason is that I require a great deal of effort and time to get the exact meaning from English literature and discuss it. Building a foundation is always a priority.

I am currently reading the photography reader (Wells, 2003), which is included in the Talis Resource Lists of Informing Contexts PHO702 as an essential resource. I read up to half of Part Three in this week and noticed that quite a few documents were written about cinema and photography as the same category contrast with painting. For instance, Walter Benjamin discussed the difference between painting and visual mechanical reproduction which includes cinema and photography. Andre Bazin pointed out that “photography and cinema would provide a natural explanation for the great spiritual and technical crisis that overtook modern painting.”(Wells, 2003: 72) Also, Osip Brik discussed them as instruments which expand the ordinary optical radius of the human eye. (Wells, 2003: 102) 
In terms of narrativity of photography, John Szarkowski, who was introduced within the week 1 presentation: Photography, Photographies, did an interesting analysis in The Photographer’s Eye(1966). He suggested that the photographer records the truth in a fragmented and unexplained form, not as a story. He continues that

“The photographer could not assemble these clues into a coherent narrative, he could only isolate the fragment, document it, and by so doing claim for it some special significance, a meaning which went beyond simple description."
(Wells, 2003: 114)

Moreover, he proposed two ways to make up for the weakness of photography to tell a coherent narrative; photomontage and photographic sequence. Photomontage is “a single image combined of two or more original and/or existing images.”(The Art Story) Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life (1857) combined over thirty images in a single photograph to create a moralistic allegory contrasting a life of sin with one of virtue. This elaborated photograph, supposedly one of the earliest practices of tableau vivant photography, reminds me of the Western painting of the same era. It mimicked painting’s function to compose elements and clues of a coherent narrative.

Rejlander, 1857, Two Ways of Life

One of the earliest example of photomontage which was recognised in their own time as pretentious failures for several reasons. However, I consider this picture marvellous artwork considering the time when it was made.

Szarkowski and also Walter Benjamin pointed out that the early days of photographic magazines achieve narrative through photographic sequences. (Wells, 2003: 114,47) It is easy to find a lot of other said a similar thing. Photography gains expanding ability on the time axis by sequencing as moving image piled up cuts to tell a story. This is definitely one way of acquiring the power of narrative for photography.

Tableau vivant can produce with just one shot in modern days. Photomontage-like narrativity becomes popular by using a photography studio system or digital photo processing technology like Photoshop. My current practice primarily aims to sophisticate photomontage-like narrativity besides I comprehend sequencing effectiveness. I will discuss another power of photography, symbols; which is largely argued within PART THREE in the later part of CRJ.
 

On second thought of Social Photo
After this week’s discussion on the forum, I would like to rethink about the relationship between photography and moving image in terms of the sociological perspective. Nathan Jurgenson wrote that

A six-second video may seem short but is a relative eternity compared with the instantaneity of a still image. Six seconds of scrolling through many still images can provide a broad range of disparate informational experiences, not just the single one a video would offer.(Jurgenson, 2020: 115)

What he is trying to say here is that social video may be able to convey more information, but it requires more time compared to social photo. However, my attitude toward this notion is a bit different. First of all, almost all social photos function when they are accompanied by captions to tell a concrete narrative. Therefore, requiring time to consume a social photo is not just a split second but at least a few seconds to read alternately the picture itself and the caption. On the contrary, social video is a kind of video which is played automatically when displayed and cautiously constructed to convey a concrete narrative ASAP; often captions are embedded on the video as subtitles. Another aspect of social video is that they do not always need to complete a story since what a contributor want to tell is often not so much different from social photo; such as just saying where they are or what they eat. Thus, people don’t have to watch a social video to the end, people can skip it whenever they want. I consider the difference between social photo and video needs a little more scrutiny.
 

The ‘nature’ of my practice
As I mentioned in the Research Project Proposal and also in Christmas preparation task, the ‘nature’ of my photography practice is the pursuit of cinematic expression by means of the fusion of tableau vivant and documentary, or ordinary life and world in a movie.

In terms of concept, Susan Sontag mentioned that photograph is more changed by its context compared to a film because it is compact and portable. (Wells, 2003: 83) I believe context is paramount for my practice too as well as aesthetics because what I would like to propose is the context itself of what ‘cinematic’ means and my quest for ‘cinematic’ expression. 

The context my work could be consumed in
This is also organised in the Research Project Proposal, I intend to contextualise my work in the film-philosophy by Gilles Deleuze, semiotics related to visual arts by Roland Barthes and Christian Metz, and narratology by Werner Wolf and Gerald Prince. 
My current project RESPECTIVE CINEMA is largely inspired by Hannah Starkey’s practice. Her agenda is showing us alternative types of images of women that represented in media with a very narrow idea as consumed stereotypically. She intends to direct the viewer’s attention to the inner life of the subject from what’s around her protagonists such as clothing or hair colour. I love her multidimensional composition in the meaning and structured ambiguity. In the mixing of artifice and realism, the sense of the present is revealed as an accumulation of past experience.
 

Other visual practices and critical ideas
I have already investigated practitioners such as Hannah Starkey, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Alex Plager, and Cindy Sherman. Currently, Larry Sultan shed new light on my practice. I recently obtained Pictures from home(Sultan, 2017) which I am going to discuss in the latter part. 
Sarah named Lev Manovich as one to the essential theorists when discussing digital photography and cinematic codes. I start to read The Language of new media(Manovich, 2000) from this week. He used the word cinema in a very broad sense which stands for larger cultural traditions.

A hundred years after cinema's birth, cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data. (Manovich, 2000: 92) 

According to him, computer displays and video games are new media which extend cinema. Since cinema has permeated a wide variety of media in modern days, he insists that “what was cinema is now the human-computer interface”(Manovich, 2000: 97) I also added Soft cinema: navigating the database (Manovich and Kratky, 2005) in my reading list. I will read further and analyse his theory and practices in-detail later.

Bibliography

WELLS, L. 2003. The Photography reader.
SULTAN, L. 2017. Pictures from home.
MANOVICH, L. 2000. The Language of new media, Cambridge, MIT Press.

Webpages

ORG., T. A. S. Photomontage - History and Concepts [Online]. https://www.theartstory.org/: The Art Story. Available: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/photomontage/history-and-concepts/ [Accessed Jan 30 2021].
MANOVICH, L. manovich [Online]. Lev Manovich. Available: http://manovich.net [Accessed Jan 31 2021].
MANOVICH, L. 1994. Little Movies [Online]. RHIZOME: RHIZOME. Available: https://rhizome.org/art/artbase/artwork/little-movies/ [Accessed Jan 31 2021].
MANOVICH, L. & KRATKY, A. 2005. Soft cinema : navigating the database, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Images

Rejlander, 1857, Two Ways of Life, https://www.theartstory.org/images20/photo/photo_photomontage_1.jpg