Choosing a camera
Translating into images
I
The Greeks used krinein for the act of separating and deciding, from which we get critique and crisis. Architectural photography begins with separating, when one part of the visible stays in the frame and the rest is left out, and with deciding, when the photographer stops in front of a street and has to choose the focal length.
II
On the cover of the Italian edition of Flusser's Per una filosofia della fotografia there is a pole vaulter by Marey, the physiologist who around 1890 photographed movement in series (1). Flusser describes the photographer as someone who believes they freely choose their images while choosing only among the possibilities the apparatus has already foreseen, and for this reason does not look for the best image but tries to make as many as possible, according to the French formula in which he sums up this attitude, "Vivre le plus, non pas le mieux" (2). Marey worked in the same way, since in order to understand a single jump he photographed a whole series of them.
III
Translating comes from the Latin traducere, to lead across, and betraying from tradere, to hand over, and Latin had a third term for the same movement, translatio, which it used to render the Greek metaphora, transport.
