Film Star Flies In
By STRIX THE more I look at the photographs published in the newspapers, the more insistently I feel, tugging as it were at my coat-tails, a baffled curiosity. How is this groggy filament in the great spider's web of mass communication managing to hold its own? Why do newspapers continue to print, on the one hand, bad photographs (when they cannot get good ones) to illustrate sensa- tional news stories, and, on the other hand, perfectly good photographs of routine occur- rences which hardly anyone wants to look at? Does either of these types of picture in fact exert upon the reader that hypnotic or beguiling effect Which alone would seem to justify its publication as a matter of course?
Since the process of reductio ad absurdum can- not be applied to something which is already, in my view, absurd, let us take a hypothetical case involving the first type of picture.
I have between my shoulders a head (Exhibit A); within reach of my left hand lies, as I write, a dog's blanket (Exhibit B). Suppose that after a long, newsworthy investigation into some foul crime a breast-high scent leads to my house. I am arrested. As I leave the building, closely escorted by two officers of the law, I envelop Exhibit A in Exhibit B. What'do you all get on your front pages next morning? A medium close shot of my dog's blanket.
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I can well understand the urge to sec what a fiend in human shape looks like; but a picture of the fiend thwarting this urge ought theoretically to be deficient in audience-appeal. It is not as though my evasive tactics have gone unrecorded, elsewhere on the front page, by the lynx-eyed re- porters. 'Stryx, his face muffled in a shawl' (Daily Cake); 'a carpet hastily thrown over his head' (Daily Jam); 'his features hidden by a raincoat' (Daily Ham); 'son visage sournois a peine masqu6 par un norfock-jacket, sur lequel on a cru remarquer plusieurs taches sinistres' (Paris- Paris).
Pictures of this sort are really confessions .of failure, and for the life of me I can see very little point in publishing them.
Editors sometimes have a valid excuse for printing a picture which is technically bad. If, for instance, it portrays an 'historic encounter at the South Pole on the previous day, nobody (yet) ex- pects the difficulties of transmission to be com- pletely overcome; nor can one demand high quality of a photograph taken on the spot of a sudden, violent and important event like an assassination.
But newspapers seem to go on the assumption that, particularly when a disaster has ocourred, any picture is better than none. Their readers are constantly being confronted with blurred, almost meaningless photographs in which ectoplasmic arc-lights, a tangle of half-seen wreckage, and a tremendously jovial rescue-worker in the fore- ground are supposed to bring vividly home to them the grim realities of the scene. Sometimes, of course, especially when the problems of time and space confronting the photographers are easily solved, their pictures are clear and dramatic; but my point is that, even when they are the reverse, they are given just as much prominence.
If the taking and reproduction of photographs were novel branches of human endeavour, these imperfect end-products would, understandably, have a certain curiosity-value; but photography has been practised for a long time and, although it is possibly true that the public will always want to see good pictures of (say) a serious railway accident, I should have thought that by now their indifference to bad pictures of the same sad sub- ject might be assumed. But it obviously is not assumed, and for this some good reason must either exist or be thought to exist. I cannnot help wondering what it is.
* * Then there are the photographs, often excellent in themselves, whose appearance in the news- papers seems to be due to some sort of editorial tic or reflex action. The Wall Game at Eton on St. Andrew's Day provides an extreme example of what I mean. Since the outcome of this con- test is a matter of complete indifference to most of the boys actually at Eton, it can hardly be supposed to excite a lively interest among the population as a whole. The game itself is no more (and, to be fair, no less) photogenic than a silage- clamp, and its nature is such that, anyhow on a muddy St. Andrew's Day, it would be perfectly possible to publish without fear of exposure a photograph of the same event taken thirty or forty years ago. Yet the photographers swarm to it like flies, and every national newspaper carries a pic- ture next day.
The whole matter is further complicated by the conventions governing the posed photograph. These are of an exquisite unreality. What we see is, in hard fact, a photograph of somebody being photographed; the purpose of the conventions is to establish a transparent pretence that this is not so, and that the subject or subjects of the photo- graph have been surprised by the camera in the performance of some action congruous to their role in the news. The captions insist that the sitters are outlining a plan of campaign ('If you could point at the map, sir. And then perhaps the Admiral would look over your shoulder. Fine! Hold it!'), comparing notes on their narrow escape, carrying out a final cheek-up of their equipment, reading the telegrams of congratula- tion, testing the dog-blanket for bloodstains.
But of course we all know that they are doing nothing of the sort; they are merely being photo- graphed. We smile at the Victorians, who when submitting to this process leant in affected atti- tudes against broken pillars or rustic benches and (if they were returned explorers) often donned native costume for the occasion; but at least they were manly enough to make no bones about the object of the exercise. They either glared at or presented their profiles to the camera, and if we find these bold attempts at portraiture funny, I fail to see why we have not yet begun to detect anything risible in the perfunctory conversation- pieces whidh have taken their place.
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The reader may by now suspect that I have no sympathy for any of the photographs which are published in the press. This is not so. Many of them are admirable. Others, though less artis- tically satisfying, have a clear raison d'etre and a disarming appeal of their own; high in this genre I would place all photographs of amateur theatricals published in local papers.
But by and large—and leaving out of account the acres of pure trash in the tabloids—it .does seem to me that we are up against a minor mystery 'here, and that an immense amount of trouble, money and newsprint is being devoted to supplying the public with pictures in which it long ago lost such little interest as it ever had.
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