Interview with Hollis Frampton

Abstract

Frampton: Well, I can, at least, tell you what the film came out of, and how it reached its present form. I first began using a movie camera at the end of the fall of 1962. At that time I was, in a way, being systematically forced into cinema by my work in still photography. I'd been working for a long time in series, sometimes long ones, and there were things about the still series that began to trouble me. For example, if you have a bunch of photographs that you believe cohere even in book space, let alone on a gallery wall, there's no way to determine the order in which they're seen, nor the amount of time for which each one is seen, nor to establish the possibility of a repeat. So that already had me thinking of film, as a kind of ordering and control, a way of handling stills.