Real Pictures Sell
200 years ago, storytellers retold the glories of victory and the horrors of defeat to enraptured assemblies of townsfolk. The depth of the emotional impact of the stories was left to the imagination of the listener. When motion
Make believe in tinsel-town lasted until the Vietnam War when we were introduced to TV coverage albeit censored by the networks. Motion picture, to this point, had not been the medium to deliver homo sapien reality to the masses.
To expect (or try to) depict real emotions on film in the past was the job of artful movie directors and career actors. Rarely did it succeed. And now comes along a new medium of motion pictures, the video format. The producers of the box-office hit,"The Blair Witch Project" asked, "What if we allowed real people to film themselves in their own experience in a potentially near-hysteria situation?" On;y three pick up "actors" were used for the film, given a medicore video camera and film, and pointed into the woods and given an assignment on a few 3x5 files cards to look into a folktale about a witch that one time frequented the hills of western Maryland.
The box office proved (the movie has made millions) viewers were ready to pay for a motion picture that was void of professional actors, computer tvisuals, and million dollar backdrops. Yes, Internet hype drove many to the film out of curiosity. But word-of-mouth drove the box office receipts off the charts. For once, viewers of the film were able to experience the real emotions of others, in a storyline that strung together raw footage that laid out their internal selves as if their emotions were beef cattle parts being prepared for supermarket meat counter packaging. (Sorry, I didn't know any other way to express the impact of this kind of footage.)
Did the film propose some message? Since the outcome of the film wasn't predetermined, the message became as vapid and as intriguing as a rumor -real, yet maybe unreal. Whatever.
Do we have a new genre of film? Is it some kind of faux snuff experience in disguise? Probably not, because
This film is more than the raw reality of a cop chase on a Los Angeles freeway. It tinkers with the thought processes of the zombie followers of two-dimensional Stephen King novels, and on a level that writers and cinematographers can't dip into. Film students for years to come will pronounce their own assessment of The Blair Witch Project. And the curious outcome is that the participants, the actors and producers, didn't know what they were getting themselves into. Art sometimes happens by accident.
Editorial photographers, by virtue of their raison d'etre of photographing single pictures, have been capturing emotional subjects like this ever since the invention of the 35mm camera--something a motion picture could not do -up until it stumbled on The Blair Witch Project. We have the same license of the producers of The Blair Witch Project. We can photograph slices of life without the crutch of Hollywood props and stand-ins. Our pictures project reality and truth.
We may not see anymore Blair Witch Project movies, but the success of the film has proved to the stock photo industry that "real pictures" sell.
Rohn Engh, veteran stock photographer and best-selling author of "Sell & ReSell Your Photos" and "sellphotos.com," has helped scores of photographers launch their careers. For access to great information on making money from pictures you like to take, and to receive this free report: "8 Steps to Becoming a Published Photographer," visit http://www.sellphotos.com
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