Still life
Charles Clover
Photography: Essays and Images edited by Beaumont Newhall (Seeker & Warburg pp. 328, £17.95, £7.95) First Photographs edited by Gail Buckland (Robert Hale pp. 192, £8.95) The Greek World text by Peter Levi, photographs by Elliot Porter (Aurum Press pp. 144, £15) In photography criticism we lag a reticent distance behind the Americans, who, oddly enough, produce some of the best (as well as the worst) debate on the subject. The American press also seems to show a more educated interest in the popular image. Life magazine was reincarnated in America in 1978, but among the admirers of CartierBresson or the Picture Post photographers the demise of Now! has provoked only half-hearted mourning.
Even the British photography magazines seem curiously reluctant to publish fine images. Of ten such publications on the shelves of a Fleet Street newsagent, three were concerned with the images themselves — the rest being largely devoted to what Ansel Adams called, in a credo published in Beaumont Newhall's book, 'equipment fetishists' — and only one of the three was published in Britain.
The Guardian, in its continued effort to show how much more enlightened it is than other newspapers, recently took the brave step of printing 'art-photographs' by Don McPhee, but the results were disappointing, even compared to the 'hard news' pictures on the remaining pages. Unfortunately, the only way for a newspaper to further the cause of better photography is to hire better feature photographers.
The American professor Beaumont Newhall was, in the Thirties, one of the founding entrepreneurs of the photography criticism industry and has since produced a respected tome, The History of Photography (new branches of criticism are unselfconscious about their titles). Though Newhall's intentions in compiling Photography: Essays and Images are undoubtedly sane and scholarly, its all-embracing title reveals a weakness. He calls it a 'source book' of essays by photographers, reports and criticism — from the prediction, astonishing only in retrospect, of the fixing of a daylight image — in a novel written in 1760 by Tiphaigne de la Roche — to a seminar given by Walker Evans in 1970. But he remains silent on what we are to make of his selection.
Patterns do emerge, however. In the absence of a theme it would be fair to invent one and call it 'photography against art'. Once through the earlier pages of the book given over to rather dull descriptions of technical processes by Fox Talbot, Scott Archer and others, what takes shape is the great, and ultimately fruitless, debate of photography versus painting which so fascinated and enraged the Victorians.
It was hard for those accustomed to the techniques of painting (Fox Talbot called photography 'photogenic drawing' until it was re-christened by IIerschel) to get used to a medium which appeared to bypass the rationalising filter of the mind. The quest for respectability in photography provoked some of the most hilarious imitation paintings from the school of H.P. Robinson. But P.H. Emerson, perhaps the greatest English 'naturalistic' photographer of the 19th century, some of whose work from Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads accompa nies his essay, gave it up altogether when he became convinced that there was no 'artistic' merit in his own masterpieces since the emulsion, and not he, was responsible for tone. It is a relief to come to the critic, quoted by Edward Weston in 1922, who said 'If I had my way, photographers should never be allowed to see paintings'. With that remark the criticism of photography came of age.
Compared to painting, though, still photography has derived little from manifestos, as can be seen from the written contributions by Moholy-Nagy, Leger and others. The polemics only score as a description of personal style. It is in the more disparate and informal personal statements and interviews towards the end of the book that the interest really lies; with Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Brassai (`I invent nothing, I imagine everything'), and the unrivalled CartierBresson interviewed (and, unusually photographed) by Newhall himself in 1946. Newhall concentrates on the techniques by which Cartier-Bresson virtually invented his own language.
Flicking through First Photographs on the other hand — an expensive half-hour for £8.95— what came to mind were some of the astonishingly modern observations by Baudelaire and Oliver Wendell Holmes on the dulling power of mass-produced images, which are reprinted in Newhall's anthology. Holmes, a great enthusiast, nevertheless said of the daguerreotype: 'It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle, the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality'. News photographs are seldom memorable, and Gail Buckland's editorial matter is confined to tabloid-style jokey captions.
'First' being the most important and the most abused word in journalism, the book illustrates admirably how its use can degenerate into absurdity. After a few passably interesting 'firsts', such as the picture of death by electric chair and the first murder victim to find herself (posthumously) in front of a lens, one finds the first picture of female breasts (in National Geographic magazine), and the first man to have killed more than 100 tigers. One picture, however, stands out. It is the first , picture taken of American troops raising the flag above the hill on Iwo Jima in 1945. Some hours later Joe Rosenthal photographed a re-enactment of the scene. His was not the first, but it is one of the best known war photographs in the history of the art.
Elliot Porter's coffee-table book The Greek World, with a spirited introduction to the Greeks for the culturally starved by Peter Levi, is an example a how uneasily the photographic and the literary essay lie together. Porter's high quality images of ancient masonry outlined 'by moaern wild flowers are cold, eiten sterile. Levi's text on the other hand has an other-than-academic warmth, despite being in the kind of type designed to be read at a distance of 20 feet. It is a curious book altogether. Anyone who can afford it would probably be better off putting down a deposit at their travel agent.
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