Cultural Cohesion (81 page)

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A photographer who interests himself more in documentary than in self-expression is nowadays likely to remain anonymous until such time as his unassertive vision turns out to have been unique all along. For most photographers that time will never come no matter how arresting their photographs.
The Best of Photojournalism 5
enshrines some of the year's most riveting shots. You can flick through it and decide if reality is being consumed. I was particularly impressed by L. Roger Turner's three pictures of a Down's syndrome boy hefting a bowling ball in the Special Olympics. Perhaps I am congratulating myself on my own compassion, which has in fact been reduced to a stock response by too many images. There is also a chance that my aesthetic sensibility is being blunted instead of sharpened when I admire Bill Wax's study of Chris Snode preparing to dive into a heated Florida pool on a cold winter's morning. Crucified in steam, Snode looks like a Duccio plus dry ice.

Eve Arnold's new book
In China
raises the question of veracity. Sontag argues persuasively that the beautifying power of photography derives from its weakness as a truth-teller. It is indeed true that a photograph can tell you something only if you already know something about its context, but the same applies to any other kind of signal. Here are some extremely pretty coloured photographs of China. They inform you of many facts, including the fact that there is at least one bald Buddhist monk still in business at the Cold Mountain monastery in Suchow. What they can't tell you is just how long those children singing in the classroom will be obliged to go on believing in the divinity of the man with his picture on the wall. The same kind of stricture, if it is one, applies to
Photographs for the Tsar
, which collects the astonishing pre-Revolutionary coloured photographs by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, a forgotten pioneer now destined to be clamorously remembered.

Prokudin-Gorskii employed a triple-negative process of his own devising. Nicholas II commissioned him to perpetuate anything that took his fancy. The results fell short of those Eve Arnold is accustomed to obtaining but not by far. Prokudin-Gorskii was necessarily limited to photographing stationary objects but took care to pick the right ones. The book takes its place beside Chloe Obolensky's indispensable
The Russian Empire
, published last year.

Across the Rhine
is the latest in the Time-Life corporation's admirable series based on its own World War II archive. Once again the text, contributed this time by Franklin M. Davis, Jr., but with the usual assistance from “the editors of Time-Life Books,” is a sane corrective to the revisionist theories now rife among more exalted historians. The photographs do what photographs best can—they give you some idea of what the reality you already know something about was like in detail. Some of the pictures taken in the liberated concentration camps are included. Sontag tells us that her life was changed by seeing these very pictures—a moment in her book which I appreciated from the heart, since it was an extensive reading of the Nuremberg transcripts, with due attention to the horrific photographic evidence contained in Volume XXXI, that did more than anything else to shape my own view of life.

Sontag might agree that whatever else images had done to take the edge off reality, they rubbed her nose in it in that case. These photographs are hard to respond to adequately but then so might have been the reality. The brave documentary photographer Margaret Bourke-White, after taking her pictures in Buchenwald, told her editors that she would have to see the prints developed before she believed what she had witnessed. It is a point for an aesthetician to seize, but too much should not be made of it. She was speaking metaphorically. The thing had happened and she could tell that it had happened. Her photographs helped, however inadequately, to tell the world.

There is a case for photographing horrors, since not all torturers are as keen as Hitler's and Pol Pot's to keep their own pictorial record of what they get up to. Snapping celebrities with their pants down is harder to justify, but in his preface to
Private Pictures
Anthony Burgess does his best to convince us that the
paparazzi
are engaged in something valuable. From the photographs you can't find out much beyond a few variously startling physical facts about the firmness of Romy Schneider's behind, the pliancy of Elton John's wrist and the magnitude of Giovanni Agnelli's virile member. It is also sensationally revealed that Orson Welles has a fat gut and Yul Brynner a bald head. Burgess is pretty scathing about Brigitte Bardot's breasts, but to me she looks in better shape than Burgess was when I last saw him.

Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it. But many of this book's victims are famous only as a side-effect of pursuing honourable careers. “This book,” growls Burgess, “in bringing stars down to the human level, is a kind of visual poem on the theme of expendability.” One night before a Cambridge Union debate I saw Burgess get angry because Glenda Jackson had not turned up to lead the opposing team. Burgess made it clear that to meet her ranked high among his reasons for being in attendance. Not even such unexpendable philosophers as Burgess are always entirely innocent of the star-fucking impulse.
Private Pictures
supplies additional evidence for the already well-documented theory that those who fuck the stars are the same people who enjoy sticking it to them.

The grinding triviality of the
paparazzi
retroactively makes the dedication of the documentary photographers sound less like solemnity and more like high seriousness. Karin Becker Ohrn's
Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition
takes you back to the days of the Farm Security Administration, when a photographer could feel that she was helping to open the world's eyes. Lange believed that it took time for a photographer's personality to emerge. Some photographers can't wait that long, but even if the wrong people sometimes get famous it is generally true that only the right ones stay that way.
Dialogue with Photography
, edited by Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper, is an absorbing compilation of interviews with the big names, including Strand, Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson, Beaton, Lartigue and Kertész. The simplicity of true artistic absorption comes shining through even the murkiest rhetoric about Art. According to the late Minor White, Stieglitz asked him if he had ever been in love. When White said yes, Stieglitz told him he could be a photographer. Lartigue makes the same point. “First, one must learn how to look, how to love.” It probably sounds better in French.

Brandt, the perpetual loner, is not present. On BBC radio recently he described how Cartier-Bresson, when they met in Paris in the 1950s, wouldn't speak to him, because he had sinned against photographic purity by cropping the negative and using artificial light. At the time of writing, Brandt is all set to unleash on London an exhibition of his recent work in which the girls are reportedly weighed down with more chains and leather straps than Helmut Newton ever dreamed of. Cartier-Bresson would doubtless not approve. The photographers have always been quite capable of ideological warfare. Ansel Adams said that Walker Evans's work gave him a hernia.

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Peter Tausk's
Photography in the 20th Century
tells you how the Western photographic tradition looks from Czechoslovakia, for whose art and photography students this book was originally written. Tausk has his nose pressed to the glass but is not unduly dazzled. He has a useful way of pointing out that the reporters are as worthy of attention as the name photographers—the kind of thought which would occur to you with special sharpness if you lived in a country where there are no reporters. The best encyclopedia of the name photographers is still
The Magic Image
by Cecil Beaton and Gail Buckland (1975). One had always suspected that Gail Buckland must have done most of the work. The suspicion is confirmed by the high quality of
Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography
, the authorship of which is claimed by her alone. Etymology, philology, mathematics, crystallography—his interests were endless, and all pursued at the highest level. On top of all that, he set the standards for the intelligent use of his invention. His photograph of volumes from his own library is a necessary reminder, bequeathed to us by the progenitor, that the apparent divorce between word and image is really an indissoluble marriage. One closes the book more astounded than ever at Talbot's achievements. It was a genius who started it all.

Whether all those famous names that have cropped up since should be thought of as geniuses is open to doubt. The Americans are more vexed by such questions than the Europeans, who better understand that some arts are minor and that it is more satisfactory to be an accomplished practitioner of a minor art than a third-rate exponent of a major one. Enjoying a less coherent social and intellectual life, the Americans have understandably either clung together for warmth or been strident in isolation. The consequent rhetoric should not too quickly be dismissed even when it is patent moonshine. The impure applied and minor arts are often accompanied by dumb talk, off which it is easy for the critic to score points. He does best, however, when addressing the thing itself. Photography, despite the attendant cacophony of promotion, remains, after all, a miraculous event—almost as interesting, in fact, as Szarkowski says it is. Castalia still has its attractions. As for the higher thinker, he must sooner or later discover that the aesthetic of photography, like the aesthetic of the novel or the aesthetic of the ballet, is a snark. The best contribution a critic can make to aesthetics is to aim for consistency, argue closely and be wary of big ideas.

Sontag's notion that images consume reality counts as a big idea. Intellectuals should speak for themselves in the first instance. Obviously images are not consuming
her
reality. So she must mean the rest of us. Nor was Benjamin being as penetrating as he sounded when he said that people flooded with images would not know how to read a book. My own children watch television for half a day at a stretch and still read more books than I did at their age. Benjamin thought of photography as one of the means by which Fascism would allow the masses to express themselves without posing any threat to the social order. At that time everyone had a theory about the masses. Benjamin had already died his lonely death before it was generally realized that the masses do not exist. There are only people—so many of them that the aesthetician can be forgiven for finding their numbers meaningless. But the critic's job is to maintain what the best photographers have helped define—a discriminating eye.

New York Review of Books
, December
18, 1980;

later included in
Even As We Speak
, 2001

48

PICTURES IN SILVER

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
by
Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard

The flow of photographic images from the past suggests that what we are already experiencing as a deepening flood in the present will seem, in the near future, like a terminal inundation. Most of the theoretical works purporting to find some sort of pattern in the cataract of pictures only increase the likelihood that we will lose our grip. But occasionally a book makes sense of the uproar. Appearing in the author's native language just before his death, Roland Barthes's
Camera Lucida
, now published posthumously in English, will make the reader sorrier than ever that this effervescent critic is no longer among the living. Barthes was the inspiration of many a giftless tract by his disciples but he himself was debarred by genuine critical talent from finding any lasting value in mechanized schemes. By the end of his life he seemed very keen to re-establish the personal, the playful and even the quirky at the centre of his intellectual effort, perhaps because he had seen, among some of those who took his earlier work as an example, how easily method can become madness.

Whatever the truth of that, here is a small but seductively argued book which the grateful reader can place on the short shelf of truly useful commentaries on photography, along with Walter Benjamin's
Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit
, Susan Sontag's
On Photography
, John Szarkowski's promotional essays and the critical articles of Janet Malcolm. Also asking for a home on the same shelf is the recently published
Photography in Print
, edited by Vicki Goldberg and including many of the best shorter writings about photography from its first days to now. As well as the expected, essential opinions of everyone from Fox Talbot to Sontag, there are such out-of-the-way but closely relevant pieces as a reminiscence by Nadar which suggests that Balzac pre-empted Benjamin's idea about photographs robbing an object of its aura; a stunningly dull critique written by one Cuthbert Bode in 1855 which shows that photography has always generated, as well as a special enthusiasm, a special intensity of patronizing scorn; and a brilliantly turned
Hiawatha
-metre poem by that fervent shutterbug Lewis Carroll.

There is, of course, a much longer shelf, indeed a whole wall of long shelves, packed with commentaries which are not particularly wrong-headed. But they are platitudinous, and in the very short run it is the weight of unobjectionable but unremarkable accompanying prose which threatens to make a minor art boring. The major arts can stand the ­pressure.

Barthes at his best had a knack for timing the soufflé. The texture of
Camera Lucida
is light, making it suitable for a heavy message. The message is heavy enough to be called subversive. Barthes finds photography interesting, but not as art. An awful lot of would-be artists are going to be disappointed to hear this. But before they smash up their Nikons in frustration they should hear the argument through, because if Barthes is disinclined to treat photographers as artists he is uncommonly inclined to examine what they do with an intelligently selective eye. “A photograph is always invisible,” he writes, “it's not it that we see.” Barthes says that what we see is the subject matter: “the referent adheres.” Barthes airily dismisses all talk of composition. Indeed he goes a long way towards saying that a photograph hasn't got any formal element worth bothering about. He claims for himself, where photography is concerned, “a desperate resistance to any reductive system”—pretty cool, when you consider the number and aridity of reductive systems his example has given rise to.

Barthes says that what he brings to the average photograph is
studium
—general curiosity. What leaps out of the exceptional photograph is a
punctum
—a point of interest. In Kertész's 1926 portrait of Tristan Tzara (unfortunately not reproduced in this book), the
studium
, says Barthes, might have to do with a Dadaist having his picture taken but the
punctum
is his dirty fingernails. In William Klein's photograph “Near the Bowery” (1954), you and I might have our attention drawn by the toy gun held to the smiling boy's head, especially if the scene arouses an echo of the Viet Cong prisoner being summarily executed in one of the most famous pieces of news film footage to have come out of Vietnam. But Barthes can't help noticing the little boy's bad teeth. Barthes is not always startled by what the photographer finds startling and is never startled by what the photographer rigs to be startling—abstract and surrealist concoctions leave him cold.

A photograph, says Barthes, does not nostalgically call up the past. Instead it shows the past was real, like now. Photography proves the past to be a reality we can no longer touch. Instead of the solace of nostalgia, the bitterness of separation. Photography is powerless as art but potent as magic. Thus his little book concludes as it began, with a confident emphasis on subject matter.

When John Szarkowski, in his 1966 critical anthology
The Photographer's Eye
, showed that for every master photographer's laboriously created definitive statement there was at least one amateur snapshot equally interesting, the photographic world had the choice of inferring either that the artists weren't artistic or else that the amateurs were artistic too. On the whole the latter course was taken, mainly because Szarkowski so persuasively extended the range of what it was possible to discuss about a photograph, so that the mere business of selecting what to shoot stood revealed for what it is—an artistic choice at some level, however diffident.

Similarly Barthes's potentially devastating re-emphasis is mollified by his willingness to concede that the selectivity involved is not just his own unusually receptive eye for the
punctum
. The photographer is allowed the faculty of selectivity too. Barthes does not seem to allow even the best photographer much more, but perhaps he just never got around to developing his argument, which nevertheless is an attractive one as it stands. If one famous American classical photographer's photograph of trees has ever worried you by looking indistinguishable from another famous American classical photographer's photograph of trees, here is a way out of your dilemma. The identity of subject matter tends to render the alleged compositional and tonal subtleties nugatory in each case. There is no reason to feel guilty just because we have got one of the Westons mixed up with one of the others.

The composition of a photograph can be analysed usefully, but not as long as it can be analysed uselessly. As with a literary work, there is a line to be drawn between the critical remark that yields meaning and the analytical rigmarole which tells you little beyond the fact that some ambitious young academic has time on his hands. Barthes's thesis is a refreshing simplification. But a fresh look doesn't always simplify. In
Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography
, the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art exhibition which will next be seen in Los Angeles and Chicago, Peter Galassi cunningly advances the deceptively simple thesis that some paintings prepared the way for the invention of photography by manifesting “a new and fundamentally modern pictorial syntax of immediate, synoptic perceptions and discontinuous, unexpected forms.”

Galassi's argument has already been examined at some length by Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner. I will not rehearse their analysis beyond saying that they find Mr. Galassi's achievement as impressive as I do. They argue that Mr. Galassi gives an incomplete account of perspective. Galassi says that over the centuries the original pictorial strategy, to make a three-dimensional world out of a flat medium, gradually reversed itself, and became the new pictorial strategy of making a flat picture out of a three-dimensional world—at which point photography, which might have been invented much earlier if anyone had really wanted it, finally showed up in order to answer the new need. Rosen and Zerner recommend that Galassi should take into account the implications of the empirical representation developed by the fifteenth-century Flemish painters. No doubt they are right, but I can think of someone else who might fit Galassi's theory even more instructively—Velázquez.

As Ortega explains in
The Dehumanisation of Art
, Velázquez was the first to look into the distance with a dilated pupil and so blur the focus of things near. That is why foreground figures in some of his pictures—one thinks particularly of
Las Meninas
—look so strange. They are strange because they are the unexamined familiar. They look the way things look when we are looking past them, as if they were floating,
converdidas en gases cromáticos, en flámulas informes, en puros reflejos
. Converted into chromatic gases, into formless flames, into pure reflections. (Ortega's writings on aesthetics are so poetic that they constitute an aesthetic problem in themselves.)

Unless I have got it hopelessly wrong, Ortega uncovered in Velázquez a concern with focus and depth of field which presages just those aspects of the photographic vision. No doubt Velázquez developed these perceptions out of a desire to mimic how the eye actually sees, but Galassi seems to be saying that the photographic pictorial strategy developed out of just that impulse, away from conceptual ordering and towards the randomly inclusive. Ortega, who said that you could see a Velázquez in one gulp, even has a vocabulary that seems ready-made for Galassi's thesis. Ortega says that the closely focussed analytic vision is feudal and that the distantly focused, synthetic vision is democratic.

Doubtless other readers of Galassi's essay will have their own ideas, not just because his argument is the kind that makes us recognize something we already suspected, but because so many of us have a head full of references. By now Malraux's
musée imaginaire
, the Museum Without Walls, has transferred itself from books of reproductions into our own skulls. But a brain which already has a few hundred of the world's great paintings arranged inside it is likely to panic when asked to take in several thousand of the world's putatively great photographs as well. Yet we can retain the notion of the photographer as artist without feeling obliged to accept his every creation as a work of art.

By and large that is what John Szarkowski does in his excellent introductory essay to
The Work of Atget
, Vol. 1:
Old France
, the magnificently produced and highly desirable catalogue volume for the first of what will be four Museum of Modern Art exhibitions devoted to Atget's work, the cycle being due to complete itself in 1984. The material will take a long time to show and took even longer to get ready. Berenice Abbott gave the museum her collection of about 5,000 Atget prints in 1968. Maria Morris Hambourg, Szarkowski's co-scholar on the project, has been occupied with nothing else since 1976. Together they have performed prodigies of research, but one expects no less. Less predictable was the way Szarkowski, while diving around among all this visual wealth like Scrooge McDuck in Money Barn No. 64, has managed to keep his critical balance, something that a man with his capacity for enthusiasm does not always find easy.

Echoing the useful distinction he established in 1966 between documentary and self-expression, Szarkowski is able to divide Atget's work up into the large number of photographs which are of historical interest and the smaller number in which the historical interest is somehow ignited into an aesthetic moment—in which, that is to say, the
studium
acquires a
punctum
. But the viewer who finds his attention not only attracted but delighted by some of these pictures will be hard-pressed to decide where the
punctum
is. Is it in the plough or the well, the overhanging tree or the doorway in the wall?

It soon becomes clear that the best of Atget's photographs, while they are unlikely to hold your interest as long as paintings might do that are nominally of the same subject, nevertheless owe their aesthetic authority to much more than an isolated piquancy. They really do imply some kind of controlling artistic personality, however attenuated. The notion of
punctum
, while necessary and welcome, is too limited a critical criterion to be sufficient. On the other hand, Barthes's other and larger notion, the one about the thereness of the past and the lost reality which rules out nostalgia, is underlined with full force. Leaving aside the soft tones of the albumen process, here is Old France looking close enough to touch and as irrecoverable as the Garden of Eden—an effect only increased by Atget's reluctance to include human beings even when the exposure time would have allowed it.

On a smaller scale but still good to have,
The Autochromes of J. H. Lartigue
shows us an unfamiliar side of another indisputable artist—his work in colour. The autochrome process has the effect, when the prints are reproduced today, of making everything look like a pointillist painting. Since Lartigue's sensibility was so like Seurat's anyway, the echo effect is often uncanny, but in fact Lartigue was no more likely than his predecessor Atget to ape painting. In his late teens when he started shooting autochromes, he kept it up from 1912 to 1927. The best surviving results are given here, prefaced by a typically charming interview with the master himself.