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New York City-based photographer of fashion Jamie Beck, with the help of web designer/tech-obsessed collaborator Kevin Burg, has created a series of moving picture GIFs that she has given the moniker, “cinemagraphs.”  Some of them feature supermodels with fluttering eyes and hair, while others depict more everyday occurrences, such as a lone subway car passenger reading the paper, which in this case, is actually moving.  According to Rocha, the cinemagraphs are “more than a photo, but not quite a video.”

Although animated GIFs have existed on the internet ever since its advent, Jamie Beck’s versions, with their thoughtful subject matter and evocative atmospheres, have elevated the art form to previously inconceivable heights.

The photographer developed the foundations for her moving pictures by first working with still shots looped in rapid succession, which stands as the most common way of making animating an image.  But once she began focusing on more fluid motion, and isolating that motion in only a few aspects of the frame, she realized that she had reimagined the pictoral moment in time, while at the same time liberating the bounds of a still photograph by showing that its inherent temporal movement. The photographer states:

“We feel there are many exciting applications for this type of moving image. There’s movement in everything and by capturing that plus the great things about a still photograph you get to experience what a video has to offer without the time commitment a video requires.”