As Bazin mentions in his essay ‘From what is cinema’ that cinema was a complete representation of reality for people like Muybridge, Lumiere, Niepce etc. and hence they tried to develop moving images of people to demonstrate the reality in true sense. This is how I would relate photography with cinema. Bazin further makes comparison of photography with painting and says that photography captures a three dimensional space whereas ‘the use of drawings’ only ‘satisfied the baroque need for the dramatic’. He beautifully defines the act of photography and its difference from painting, where he says that painting would always have the presence of the painter or his subjectivity would reflect in his work no matter how talented the painter is but it is only photography which can be created in the absence of the man. “All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.” (162). He says that painting creates eternity whereas photography captures the time.

I agree with Bazin when he says that photography, though, is very objective unlike painting which is subjective, the role of selecting the objects to be photographed depends however on the photographer but the ‘originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent.’ We could see this in cinema, for example in the film Rear Window where the image captured from the window of the outside world is left open for the viewer to focus and interpret the image (many times). Or in one of the films made by Satyajit Ray, a famous Indian director, where he captures the image of a train passing through a village which still has no electricity or the excitement of two young kids looking at the train. We can understand how photography can capture the time in the image through the example of this film. Probably here the train was a source of introduction of the advancement of technology for the children who till then did not have any connection with technology. The other moments of capturing the time would be from the same film when one of the children fall sick and she is lying down on the floor beside a burning lamp which metaphorically demonstrates life and with the death of the child the flame goes off and the image captured is of darkness probably like the death.  The other interesting images would be the flight of stairs in one of the Russian film, the image of a factory from inside with its laborers working in a Charlie Chaplin film and the image of a never ending road in Easy Rider.

I believe that photography in cinema though, captures images from the real life but, it originates from the lens of the camera and it ‘contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it.’