Looking for inspiration? Find a Mutoscope.

 
After three jam-packed weeks attend­ing Pho­tok­ina, the Glimpse Con­fer­ence, Cloud­force, and Pho­to­Plus Expo, I have some­thing to con­fess: the most inter­est­ing and inspir­ing gadget/technology/trend I saw was NOT Samsung’s inno­v­a­tive Galaxy Cam­era, Fuji’s slick X-E1, Blackmagic’s Cin­ema Cam­era or a new pow­er­ful soft­ware application.

It was a Muto­scope I saw at Frankfurt’s Film Museum. “A what?” you may ask.

The Muto­scope, an early motion pic­ture device, was patented by Her­man Casler in 1894. Cheaper and sim­pler than Edison’s Kine­to­scope, it did NOT project on a screen, and it pro­vided view­ing to only one per­son at a time. The sys­tem was mar­keted by the Amer­i­can Muto­scope Com­pany and quickly dom­i­nated the coin-in-the-slot “peep-show” business.

I am in love with the sim­plic­ity of this device, the way the viewer inter­acts with the story by using a hand crank. And story is what really mat­ters. In under 60 sec­onds (the “movie” starts below at 00:34) we get to see a “crazy wheel” run­ning free through a small town, and the vil­lagers try­ing to catch it. See, this is about sto­ry­telling, not tech­nol­ogy. It’s not about sen­sor size, firmware updates, bigger-is-better, or faster-is-better. It is about the story, some­thing I feel we have been loos­ing at an ever-increasing speed. If you are look­ing for some inspi­ra­tion or moti­va­tion, look no further.

Events like hur­ri­cane Sandy make us revalue some of our pri­or­i­ties, the real sig­nif­i­cance of things we often take for granted, like run­ning water, elec­tric­ity, and true friends. In a sim­i­lar way the Muto­scope hit a nerve. For some strange rea­son, the idea of pro­duc­ing some­thing sim­ply for fun or plea­sure is becom­ing obso­lete. We should, and we will, go back to the basics. Work harder on telling more engag­ing sto­ries, devel­op­ing new angles, com­mu­ni­cat­ing bet­ter ideas and ask­ing deeper ques­tions. Tech­nol­ogy is great, but it is not the be-all and end-all that most pho­tog­ra­phers assume it to be. I’m sure some of you feel the same way. Want even more inspi­ra­tion? Check this out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2012 at 14:59. It is filed under Analysis, Technology, Visuals and tagged with , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.