Even as We Speak (47 page)

When we say that the lives of any of our young men and women under arms were wasted we should be very careful what we mean. We who are lucky enough to live in the world they helped to make safe
from institutionalized evil can’t expect any prizes for pronouncing that war is not glorious. They knew that. They fought the wars anyway, and that
was
their glory. It’s
obviously true that the world would have been a better place if the wars had never happened, but it’s profoundly true that it would have been an infinitely worse place if they had not been
fought and won.

All our dead would rather have lived in peace. But there was no peace. Now there is, and perhaps, in our protected, cushioned and lulling circumstances, one of the best ways to realize what life
is really worth is to try to imagine the intensity with which they must have felt its value just before they lost it. Sacrifice is a large word, but no word can be large enough for that small
moment. The only eloquence that fits is silence – which I will ask you to observe with me as I fulfil my gladly accepted duty and unveil this plaque.

Battersea Park, 1988

Like the short script for the BBC television programme about
Hamlet
reproduced in the previous section, the first two of these three articles hail from a time frame
rather earlier than the one nominally set for this collection. But I am not putting them in just because I overlooked them last time. They were never overlooked: they were left out for a reason.
The piece about photography included remarks about Janet Malcolm which a mutual friend told me had caused offence. If she had been offended, I didn’t want to offend her again: but in the
interim Malcolm (as an American magazine would refer to her) has proved herself tough enough to bear other people’s embarrassment, so perhaps it’s time for me to try proving that I am
tough enough to bear hers. The piece on the House of Lords I left out before because I thought it made me sound servile to British institutions. By now I am convinced that any British institution
offering a check or a balance to government power should be defended, whatever the risk to one’s reputation. Besides, there are phrases in the piece that still strike me as the best way I
could make that particular point. I like to think that true of any piece I write, of whatever brevity, even that of a caption. Over the years I have left a good proportion of my journalism
uncollected, but I never wrote any of it with evanescence in mind: I abandoned a piece because of what it lacked in quality, not because of what its genre lacked in dignity. By other writers, books
of collected casual pieces are the books I like best: in other words, I like the kind of writer who gets his gift into anything, and who, therefore, can never write anything so trivial that it does
not bear reprinting. My own critics are fond of calling me the kind of egotist who would publish his laundry lists if he could get away with it. I have never found that gibe to have much force,
because there are so many writers whose laundry lists I would like to read. The third piece, which I
did
overlook twenty-five years ago, is about a man who, as a matter of course,
reprinted his every written utterance, and thank God he did. Beachcomber’s books were like this one, at least in kind; so there can be nothing wrong with the kind, whatever might be lacking
in the execution.

The very first book illustrated with photographs, William Fox Talbot’s
The Pencil of Nature
(1844), carried as an epigraph a quotation from Virgil. Talbot, who
was a learned classicist as well as a chemist clever enough to invent photography, enlisted Virgil’s aid in declaring how sweet it was to cross a mountain ridge unblemished by the wheel ruts
of previous visitors, and thence descend the gentle slope to Castalia – a rural paradise complete with well-tended olive groves. The gentle slope turned out to be a precipice and Castalia is
buried miles deep under photographs. A subsidiary avalanche, composed of books about photographs, is even now descending. In this brief survey I have selected with some rigour from the recent
output, which has filled my office and chased me downstairs into the kitchen.

In her book
On Photography
(1977) Susan Sontag darkly warned the world that images are out to consume it. Books about images are presumably also in on the feast. Hers
remains the best theoretical work to date, although competitors are appearing with startling frequency. Gisèle Freund’s
Photography and Society
, now finally available in
English, is half historical survey, half theoretical analysis. Her own experience as a celebrated photographer has obviously helped anchor speculation to reality. When the argument takes off, it
takes off into a comfortingly recognizable brand of historical determinism. Thus it is made clear how the early portrait photographers served the needs of the bourgeoisie and wiped out the
miniaturists who had done the same job for the aristocracy: hence the collapse of taste. Baudelaire, who hated the bourgeoisie, consequently hated photography too. These reflections come in handy
when you are looking at the famous photograph of Baudelaire by Nadar. That baleful look must spring from resentment. Sontag makes greater play with such historical cruxes but Freund gives you more
of the facts.

Janet Malcolm, the
New Yorker
’s photography critic, has produced a worthwhile compilation of her essays. She thinks ‘discomfit’ means ‘make uncomfortable’,
but such lapses are rare. More high-flown than Freund, although less self-intoxicatingly so than Sontag, Malcolm is an excellent critic between gusts of aesthetic speculation.
Diana and
Nikon
is grandly subtitled ‘Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography’. Whether there is such a thing as an aesthetic of photography is a question which critics should try to keep
open as long as possible, since that is one of the things that good criticism always does – i.e. stops aestheticians from forming a premature synthesis. In her essay on Richard Avedon,
Malcolm assesses the April 1965 issue of
Harper’s Bazaar
, the one edited by Avedon, as a ‘self-indulgent mess’. But she insists on being charitable, against what she has
already revealed to be her own better judgement, about his warts-foremost portraits of the mid-fifties. ‘Like the death’s-head at the feast in medieval iconography, these pictures come
to tell us that the golden lads and lasses frolicking down the streets of Paris today will be horrible old people tomorrow . . . Avedon
means
to disturb and shock with these pictures, in
the way that the young Rembrandt . . . the ageing Swift . . .’

Whatever its stature as aesthetics, this is low-grade criticism. Every artist who shoves something nasty in your face
means
to shock. When Rembrandt portrayed the decay of the flesh he
was saying that ugliness, too, is a part of life, and even part of the beautiful. By using such a phrase as ‘horrible old people’ Malcolm unwittingly proves that she has caught
something of Avedon’s crassness, even while taking him to task. A photographer might be permitted to think in such coarse terms if he is inventive enough in his work, but it is a ruinous
habit in a critic and can’t be much of an advantage even to an aesthetician, who should be above making her older readers feel uncomfortable, or discomfited.
Cras mihi
–
tomorrow it is my turn – remains a useful motto.

Malcolm calls photography the uppity housemaid of painting. Not a bad idea, but like her range of reference it shows an inclination to worry at the phantom problem of whether photography is an
art or not. Sontag does better by calling photography a language: nobody wastes time trying to find out whether a language is an art. But Malcolm, between mandatory bouts of ratiocinative fever,
stays cool enough to give you some idea of the thinner book she might have written – the one subtitled ‘Critical Essays about Photography’. She shows herself capable of scepticism
– a quality not to be confused with cynicism, especially in this field, where an initial enthusiasm at the sheer wealth of stimuli on offer can so easily switch to a bilious rejection of the
whole farrago.

On the subject of Diane Arbus’s supposedly revolting portraits of freaks and victims, Malcolm makes the penetrating remark that they are not really all that revolting after all – the
reason for their popularity is that they are reassuringly in ‘the composed, static style of the nineteenth century’. Such limiting judgements are more useful than dismissive ones, and
more subversive too. Similarly, when she says that Edward Weston, far from being the ‘straight’ photographer he said he was, was simply copying new styles of painting instead of old
ones, she isn’t trying to destroy him – just to define him.

A vigorously interested but properly sceptical tone is the necessary corrective to the star system promoted by John Szarkowski. Operating from his command centre at New
York’s Museum of Modern Art, Szarkowski has conjured up from photography’s short past more geniuses than the Renaissance ever knew. Szarkowski’s passion would be infectious even
if he lacked discrimination, but in fact he is a first-rate critic in detail and an admirably cogent thinker within his field. The Museum of Modern Art booklet
Looking at Photographs
(1973) continues to be the best possible short introduction to the entire topic. In it he draws the vital distinction between self-expression and documentary, and draws it at the moment when it is
least obvious yet most apposite – with reference to a photograph by Atget of a vase at Versailles. Other photographers, according to Szarkowski, had been concerned either with describing the
specific facts (documentation) or with exploiting their individual sensibilities (self-expression). Atget fused and transcended both approaches. Szarkowski’s gift for argument manages to
convince you that Atget’s artistic personality is somehow present in a picture otherwise devoid of living human content. In an earlier Museum booklet,
The Photographer’s Eye
(1966, reprinted this year), he declared himself aware that the ‘fine art’ and ‘functional’ traditions were intimately involved with each other – another vital
critical precept.

So there is nothing simplistic about Szarkowski. It will be a rare aesthetician who matches his analytical capacity. There is not much wrong with his prose either, apart from his conviction that
‘disinterested’ means ‘uninterested’. What disturbs you about his writings is how they make photography so overwhelmingly significant. For Szarkowski, photography is the
biggest deal since the wheel. If he did not feel that way he would never have got so far as a curator and showman, but when the same fervour smites his readers they can be excused for succumbing to
a mild panic. Surely photography isn’t everything.

It isn’t, but it isn’t nothing either. One can be sceptical about just how great Szarkowski’s great artists are, but there is no reason for deciding that they are anything less
than a remarkable group of people. Just how remarkable is now being revealed by a swathe of plush monographs. The hard work of the archivists and curators is paying off in a big way. Only in a
climate of acceptance could these sumptuously produced books come to exist. The late Nancy Newhall’s
The Eloquent Light
is a new edition of her biography of Ansel Adams, first
published by the Sierra Club in 1963. It traces Adams’s career from 1902 up to 1938, by which time Alfred Stieglitz had given him – in 1936, to be precise – the one-man show that
helped establish him as a master photographer.

The book has plates drawn from Adams’s whole range, although the Yosemite photographs inevitably stand out. The text gives due regard to the emphasis he placed on cleanliness. The washed
prints were tested for any lingering traces of hypo. Adams was not alone among the American photographers in taking himself so solemnly: with monk-like austerity they acted out the seriousness of
their calling. That its seriousness was not yet unquestioned only made it the more necessary to keep a long face. In the case of Adams the results justified any amount of pious rhetoric about the
Expanding Photographic Universe. Published last year,
Yosemite and the Range of Light
contains the finest fruits of Adams’s long obsession with the Sierra Nevada. The quality of the
prints is bewitching. They are so sharp you can taste the steel. Blacks, grays, and whites look as lustrous as the skin of a Siamese cat.

Walter Benjamin thought a work of art could have authenticity but a photograph could not. He said so in the famous essay whose title is usually translated as ‘The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, although really it should be translated as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility’, since Benjamin’s point
was that mankind had always produced everyday things in multiple copies but it was only lately that the work of art had become subject to the same rule. Since a given negative could yield any
number of prints, Benjamin argued, to ask for an ‘authentic’ print made no sense (‘
die Frage nach dem echten Abzug hat keinen Sinn
’). Sontag, who in other respects
might have subjected Benjamin’s great essay to a less awe-stricken scrutiny, realized that on this point at least the sage was exactly wrong. Negatives can be damaged, prints can be made from
prints, paper and methods of reproduction can fall short of a photographer’s wishes. Obviously some prints are more authentic than others and you can’t have greater or lesser degrees of
nothing. These prints of Adams’s Yosemite photographs are so
echt
they sing. El Capitan looms through a winter sunrise. Half Dome shines clean as a hound’s tooth under a
thunderhead or fills with shadows as the moon, filled with shadows of its own, plugs a hole in the sheet steel sky.

Suppose Paul Strand had taken pictures of the same chunks of geology: could a layman, however knowledgeable, tell the difference? Even the most distinctive photographers tend to be defined more
by subject matter than by style. If a photographer’s any and every photograph were immediately identifiable as his he would probably be individual to the point of mania. Good photographs look
better than bad photographs but don’t often look all that much different from one another. Some of Paul Strand’s photographs in
Time and New England
, a book devised in
collaboration with the much-missed Nancy Newhall (she died in 1974), look as if Adams might have taken them, yet it is no reflection on either man. The book was first published in 1950 but is now
redesigned, with the prints brought closer to the authentic state. Adams’s senior by twelve years, Strand likewise profited from an association with Stieglitz. These connections of
inspiration and patronage are very easy to be impressed by, but it is worth remembering that just because half the Florentine sculptors were all born on the same few hills did not make them blood
brothers. The life of art lies in what makes artists different from one another – the individual creative personality. The main difference between a clapboard church by Paul Strand and a
clapboard house by Harry Callahan is that in Strand’s lens the church leans backward and in Callahan’s the house leans forward.