Animated gifs have had a long and dubious history on the internet. From the “under construction” signs and flashing borders of the 90′s web, to 4chan and senorgif today. However, two New York photographer and web designer have collaborated to create a new and beautiful artform – “cinemagraphs” – or for non-hipsters – photgraphs that “move”.
It is exciting to see technology that has been around and static (pun intended) for literally decades being moved in new directions. Just waiting for someone to push the boundaries of social networking using gopher 
The artists themselves describe them thusly:
Our Cinemagraphs are a way of adding motion to a still image. On average, the more intricate ones take a day to edit and the simpler ones take 3-4 hours. It’s something we’d been experimenting with for about a year but it really came together during fashion week with the post “Les Tendrils” and culminated with “Anna Sees Everything” which touches on the “ultimate portrait” — an image that captures the essence of a person through an action or a scene they are closely associated with. Another example of that is “We all get dressed for Bill.” The image format of these is .gif — and that’s been highly influential to their style since a .gif adds many interesting and archaic limitations to what is possible. The .gif format is practically as old as the internet itself and we find it interesting that as a format it’s getting new life, particularly on Tumblr. But ultimately it’s a delivery mechanism in the same way JPEG is to still images.
To see more of these beauties, have a look here.
