Featured Image: Silence of the Lambs, 1991

Photographs of Films

Jason Shulman’s work allows you to see past, present and future all at once. Schulman’s images from the series ​“Photographs of Films” are made by taking one long film exposure of a screen as it plays an entire movie. The resulting photographs are comprised of all the scenes layered on top of one another into one image.

Schulman positions the viewer in the role of the all-seeing eye. This is interesting to me, because it toys with that question that we often ask ourselves: What if we could see everything at once? Would we have a better understanding of what we are looking at? We often try to comfort ourselves for our short sightedness by saying that only ​“Hindsight is 20/20.” Schulman’s images deliver us this 20/20 vision all at once, but what we get instead of intense clarity, what we get instead is an impressionistic blur.

That being said, his photographs do give you the feeling that you are somehow able to see the ​“soul” of each film. Alice in Wonderland boils down to a bright mushroom cloud of yellow, teal and purple. Trainspotting is a collection of sharp geometric shapes, with a blur of unintelligible layered text at the bottom. Schulman himself says, ​“There are roughly 130,000 frames in a 90-minute film and every frame of each film is recorded in these photographs. You could take all these frames and shuffle them like a deck of cards, and no matter the shuffle, you would end up with the same image I have arrived at. Each of these photographs is the genetic code of a film – it’s visual DNA.”

Schulman’s work is a strange and seeming impossible hybrid of photography and video- On one hand, it offers us what a film can- the world in motion. And yet, at the same time, they are still photographs- one moment frozen in time.

- Mia

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Alice in Wonderland, 1951

The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964

Trainspotting, 1996

Wizard of Oz, 1930

Yellow Submarine, 1968