Chapter 25
Photography: From a Science to an Art
In This Chapter
Developing photography into an art
Focusing on photojournalism
Editing society with a camera
Zooming in on everyday life
What does a photograph have that a painting doesn’t? That’s not what most pioneering photographers asked themselves in the 19th century. They wanted to know how photography could mimic painting. It was natural for early photographers to imitate an older, established form of image making, just as a couple generations later it was natural for the first film- makers to copy theater. Early photographers posed their models like a painter does. They photographed still lifes and built up composite pictures in the tradition of historical painting.
Early photographers had something to prove: In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many people considered photography a science rather than an art. To gain recognition for photography as an art form, photographers had to show that they could compete with painting. After they achieved this goal (in the first two decades of the 20th century), photography began to develop its own identity.
In this chapter, I examine the birth of the science of photography and photography’s development into high art.
The Birth of Photography
In 1824, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), a French inventor, developed a process that he called heliography (“sun writing”). Using heliography, he made the first photograph in 1826. He captured this image by treating a metal plate with bitumen (a black, sticky substance) and exposing it to sunlight for about eight hours. The sunlight eventually hardened the bitumen so that it held the image.
In 1827, unable to market his miraculous invention, Nicéphore Niépce partnered with the business-savvy Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) in England. Nicéphore Niépce taught Daguerre his process and recommended ways to perfect it. After Niépce died in 1833, Daguerre improved Niépce’s method and patented it in 1839. He called the process the daguerreotype. The French government acquired Daguerre’s patent and generously made the process available to everyone in the world.
Around 1834 to 1835, the Englishman William Fox Talbot (1800–1877) learned to capture the “shadow” of a leaf or other object on paper coated with silver and table salt. In 1839, he figured out how to create a negative photographic image from which he could produce countless positive images. He called his discovery the Talbotype (a.k.a. calotype), and he patented it in 1841. Although Talbot’s images were not as sharp as daguerreotypes, they were reproducible.
In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer developed the wet-collodion process, which dramatically sharpened the negative image. The downside of the wet process was that photos had to be developed before the emulsion solution on the plate dried. So photographers had to shoot their subjects in studios or lug their darkrooms around with them. This is what the first photojournalists did during the American Civil War and Crimean War — carried their darkrooms onto the battlefield.
In 1878, the American George Eastman (1854–1932) pioneered the dry-plate development process (which meant photojournalists could now leave their darkrooms at home). In 1885, Eastman invented roll film, which he perfected and marketed four years later. Not only did roll film make photography available to everyone, but it also paved the way for movies.
From Science to Art
Most early photographers explored the documentary capabilities of the camera rather than its artistic potential. But there were exceptions. Scottish painter David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) and the Scottish photographer Robert Adamson (1821–1848) teamed up to create the first series of artistic portraits between 1843 and 1847. Among their finest work are their Portraits of Distinguished Scotsmen and The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth. Their collaboration was cut short by Adamson’s untimely death at the age of 27.
The greatest French photographer of the 19th century, Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884), was a major force in helping to elevate photography’s status as an art. He wrote a treatise on photography called Traité pratique de photographie sur papier et sur verre (Practical Treatise of Photography on Paper and Glass) in which he stated, “It is my deepest wish that photography, instead of falling within the domain of industry, of commerce, will be included among the arts. That is its sole, true place, and it is in that direction that I shall always endeavor to guide it.” Le Gray, who began his career as a painter, switched to photography in 1847.
To make his photographs more painterly, Le Gray invented the wax-paper negative, which produced softer images than the earlier glass negatives. (Wax-paper negatives were also more portable.) With wax-paper negatives, Le Gray captured radiant scenes of the forest of Fontainebleau in the style of the Barbizon painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (see Chapter 18) and poetic, luminescent shots of the Normandy coast.
Not only did many connoisseurs view Le Gray’s work as high art, but his Normandy and Fontainebleau photographs inspired the father of Impressionism, Claude Monet, who painted similar scenes in both locations in the 1860s to 1880s.
Despite his success, the mainstream art world wasn’t prepared to accept Le Gray’s work as art. When he entered eight photos in a Paris arts competition in 1850, the jury accepted all eight images — because they mistook them for lithographs (prints made with a stone or metal plate). When the jury realized they were photographs, they rejected them.
From the 1840s to the 1890s, the majority of photographers either focused on the science of photography, like the members of the Royal Photographic Society in England, or on documentary photography (recording life). Photographers, such as Mathew Brady (c. 1823–1896) and Timothy O’Sullivan (c. 1840–1882), both of whom shot the American Civil War, were regarded as pictorial journalists, not artists. Nevertheless, their documentary photographs brought home the horrors of war for the first time in history. O’Sullivan’s powerful photographs of the Battle of Gettysburg, including his most famous photo, “The Harvest of Death,” inspired President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Alfred Stieglitz: Reliving the Moment
More than anyone else, Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) elevated photography to an art form in the United States. He didn’t do it alone, but he was the driving force. Stieglitz achieved his goal through his own artful photo compositions and by co-founding the Photo-Secession movement with another pioneering photographer, the 21-year-old Edward Steichen (1879–1973), in 1902.
The Photo-Secession movement was modeled on similar groups in Europe. The movement held exhibitions of members’ photographs and promoted photography as high art. To win recognition, the Photo-Secessionists imitated painting, especially Romantic, Realist, and Impressionist art. In 1910, they held an exhibition featuring 500 photographs at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Their goal was to influence American museums to begin purchasing photographs for their collections. They were successful; the Albright Art Gallery became the first American museum to buy photography and display it as a high art.
This practice of imitating paintings in photographs is called Pictorialism. Basically, it means that photographs should be picturesque like Impressionist paintings. Pictorialism was an international movement and included the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring in Great Britain; the Vienna Camera Club in Austria; the Photo-Club de Paris in France; Das Praesidium in Hamburg, Germany; and other groups. In 1901, the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, which held annual exhibitions called the Photographic Salon, noted, “Through the Salon the Linked Ring has clearly demonstrated that pictorial photography is able to stand alone and that it has a future quite apart from that which is purely mechanical.” Led by the influential photographer Henry Peach Robinson along with George Davison, the Linked Ring group had broken off from the Royal Photographic Society in 1892 because they felt it was wedded to the mechanical or scientific side of photography.
An example of Pictorialism is Stieglitz’s “Spring Shower.” The distinct, black lines of the young tree in the foreground contrast dramatically with the gray misty rain that softly erases much of the cityscape. Stieglitz captured effects of the atmosphere like a Monet with a camera. This very painterly photograph — with its simple lines, poetic mistiness, and spell of stillness — is reminiscent of a meditative Japanese composition.
To further the goals of the Photo-Secession movement, Stieglitz launched a magazine called Camera Work in 1903 (see Chapter 23). During its 14-year life, Camera Work featured the best of American photography, modern poetry, articles on photography, modern art, and literature. In 1905, Stieglitz opened his famous Photo-Secession Gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Known simply as “291,” the gallery not only exhibited photography, but also introduced the United States to Auguste Rodin, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Henri Matisse before the famous Armory Show of 1913 (see Chapter 23). Ironically, while promoting realistic photography, Stieglitz strongly supported the antirealistic European avant-garde.
A few years after the 291 exhibitions and the Armory Show, the influence of European Modernism caused American photographers to do an about-face and abandon Pictorialism. Photography had proven it could compete with painting. Now it was time for it to find its own voice.
The next generation of photographers — those shooting in the 1920s and 1930s (and after), like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, and Dorothea Lange — evolved their own personal photographic styles, and in so doing, helped photography learn to be itself.
Henri Cartier-Bresson and the “Decisive Moment”
The photographs of Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) don’t look like black-and-white paintings — they look like photographs. “Photography is not like painting,” he said. “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative.” Yet, Cartier-Bresson learned a lot about taking pictures from studying painting.
As a teenager and young man, Cartier-Bresson trained to be a painter. His outstanding teacher, André l’Hote, tried to wed Cubism to classical French painting, in particular the formal and somewhat geometric compositions of Jacques-Louis David and Nicolas Poussin. What Cartier-Bresson learned from l’Hote about composition influenced not only his paintings but his photography. It gave him his amazing skill to recognize poetic or surreal arrangements of forms, repeated lines, shadows, and highlights in the blink of an eye. He said that in a fraction of a second, a photojournalist must be able to recognize simultaneously “the significance of an event” and “a precise organization of forms.”
Cartier-Bresson eventually abandoned his teacher’s style and turned to Surrealism. He’d begun hanging out with the Parisian Surrealists and bought into their ideas about capturing the unconscious on canvas. He tried to do the same in his own paintings but was dissatisfied with the results and destroyed most of his work.
He switched from painting to photography in 1931 after seeing a photograph by Martin Munkácsi of three naked boys running joyously into a lake (“Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika”). The photograph convinced him that the camera could capture uninhibited life as the Surrealists tried to do with their brushes. He gave up painting and devoted himself to photography, scouting the streets of Paris to capture people in unguarded moments.
The invention of the compact Leica camera in Germany in 1924 or 1925 made photographers’ jobs much easier. It meant they no longer had to drag a tripod around. Most importantly, it enabled them to shoot inconspicuously, to become the proverbial fly on the wall. In his book The Decisive Moment, Cartier-Bresson wrote, “It is essential . . . to approach the subject on tiptoe.” This is why he didn’t use a flash.
Cartier-Bresson’s fly-on-the-wall style and his sensitive eye enabled him to become one of the world’s greatest photojournalists. His photos, which chronicle many of the major events of the 20th century, appeared in magazines such as Paris Match, Life, Look, Du, Epoca, and Harper’s Bazaar.
His photograph “Mexico” shows his mastery of poetic, geometrical composition. At a glance, the picture looks like a shadow painting. Two female figures — what appear to be the shadow of a classical nude statue and the silhouette of a real woman — stand in a stairwell slashed by shadows and angular bands of light. You see both women in profile, each facing the opposite direction. The shadowy statue appears poised to descend the stairs, while the silhouette leans against a column waiting for life to happen. The photograph brims with mystery and otherworldly beauty.
In “Berlin Wall,” Cartier-Bresson again captured a remarkably suggestive moment packed with tension. Three suited people (you only see their backs) take in the bleak cityscape on the eastern side of the wall. The dreary architecture seems infected by the repressive political climate of Communist East Berlin. Stark, brutal shapes comprise the lower section of the Berlin Wall, which strangely harmonizes with the desolate-looking apartment buildings flanking it. Not a flower pot, window decoration, or piece of curtain relieves the barrenness of the view. The wall and street it slices in half are the front lines in the Cold War. There’s no destruction, but there’s no sign of life either. Beauty and color seem to have gone into hiding.
Group f/64: Edward Weston and Ansel Adams
Like Cartier-Bresson, American photographers such as Edward Weston (1886–1958) and Ansel Adams (1902–1984) rejected Pictorialism in the 1920s and 1930s for “straight photography” — pure realism with little or no darkroom manipulation. Instead of imitating painting, Weston and Adams chose to let the camera be itself — its artful self.
To help them achieve their goals, Weston, Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and others founded Group f/64 in San Francisco in 1932. The group took its name from the fact that its members used the smallest aperture (the camera opening that lets in light) on a large-format camera to get as much depth of field (the in-focus area between the foreground and background) as possible. A miniscule aperture permits only a tiny bit of light to enter the camera, so the camera’s shutter speed (the length of time the aperture stays open) must be increased, often to more than a minute so there’s enough light to expose the film. That meant the photographers could only shoot still lifes and scenery, not moving objects, which require quick shutter speeds to stop the action.
The small-aperture approach enabled Edward Weston to shoot his favorite subjects — nudes, vegetables, seashells, and landscapes — with incredible intimacy. His camera closed in on the subject, intensifying every detail so that textures seem touchable. In his photograph “Pepper,” strong highlights, together with the sharp depth of field, emphasize the pepper’s organic undulations, giving it a rich tactile appeal that makes it seem more like a female nude than a vegetable.
Adams, whose specialty was majestic western scenery, transformed distant mountains, valleys, rock formations, and trees into transcendental landscapes, the background and foreground both in sharp focus as if illuminated by a mystic light (see “Winter Sunrise from Lone Pine” in the appendix). Adams also achieved razor-edged contrasts between light and dark by developing a “zone system,” in which he divided gradations of light into ten zones from very light to very dark. He measured these zones with a light meter and was thereby able to exercise strict control over the lights and darks in his photographs.
Dorothea Lange: Depression to Dust Bowl
The American photojournalist Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) is famous for her photographs of migrant workers, California migrant labor camps, and destitute men in bread lines (such as “White Angel Breadline, San Francisco”). Her photos still define the Great Depression for most Americans.
Working under Roy Stryker in the History Division of the Resettlement Administration, along with other top photographers like Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn, Lange’s job was to document the plight of migrant workers who’d fled from the Dust Bowl disaster in Oklahoma and Texas to seek work in the orange groves and corporate farms of California.
For Lange, documenting this catastrophe was more than a job. As a reformist, she photographed the harsh conditions in the migrant-labor camps to provoke change and government intervention. Lange captured the human suffering in unsentimental yet powerful ways. In a letter to Stryker, she said, “I saw conditions over which I am still speechless.”
Because Resettlement Administration images were available to all American newspapers, Lange’s photographs made a dramatic impact on public opinion and caused the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to authorize the creation of government camps in California for migrant workers. Lange’s most famous Depression-era photograph is “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California” (see Figure 25-1), shot on a rainy March day in 1936 at the Pea-Pickers Camp. Lange spent about ten minutes taking six shots (one of which she kept for herself). She recalled the experience in a 1960 Popular Photography article “The Assignment I’ll Never Forget: Migrant Mother”:
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Lange documented the forced relocation of Japanese Americans into concentration camps for the War Relocation Authority. In one of the most poignant images, “Salute of Innocence,” dozens of young Japanese girls standing in front of the American flag ardently recite the Pledge of Allegiance before being locked up in relocation camps. Fearing a public backlash over the provocative images, the U.S. Army impounded all of Lange’s roughly 800 photographs of the “relocation” of Japanese Americans.
|
Figure 25-1: Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California” (1936) captures the despair of the Great Depression and is a portrait of the era. |
|
Dorothea Lange, American, 1895–1965, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936. The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, Gift of Paul S. Taylor. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Margaret Bourke-White: From Smokestacks and Steel Mills to Buchenwald and the Death of Gandhi
Like many other early 20th-century artists, Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) viewed the Machine Age as mankind’s salvation. Capturing the imposing geometric forms of steel mills, skyscrapers, and dams was one of her fortes. She said, “To me these industrial forms were all the more beautiful because they were never designed to be beautiful. They had a simplicity of line that came from their direct application to a purpose. Industry, I felt, had evolved an unconscious beauty — often a hidden beauty that was waiting to be discovered.”
Bourke-White began as an industrial photographer in Cleveland, Ohio, for the Otis Steel Company. Impressed by her photographs of Cleveland steel mills, Henry Luce (founder of Time, Inc.) hired her as the first photographer of his new magazine Fortune in 1929.
Six years after Bourke-White joined Fortune, Luce launched Life magazine and hired her as one of the magazine’s first four photographers. The inaugural issue of Life (November 23, 1936) featured Bourke-White’s famous shot of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana. The mammoth structure (250 feet high and over 4 miles long) was built as an FDR New Deal project in the mid-1930s. The angle at which Bourke-White shot the awesome construction (incomplete at the time), and the stark contrasts of light and shadow, make it look like a Machine Age version of a colossal Egyptian temple.
As a Life photographer, Bourke-White was able to go places no female photographer and few male photographers had been before. She was the first female war correspondent and the first Western photojournalist permitted to photograph in the Soviet Union. She shot the Nazi invasion of Russia, the Allies’ Italian campaign, General Patton’s march across Germany, and the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the war, she photographed the birth pangs of India and Pakistan and the death of Gandhi.
She replied, “Oh, I didn’t come to spin with the Mahatma. I came to photograph the Mahatma spinning.”
The secretary responded firmly: “How can you possibly understand the symbolism of Gandhi at his spinning wheel? How can you comprehend the inner meaning of the wheel, the charka, unless you first master the principles of spinning?”
So Bourke-White took an on-the-spot course, and learned the basics of spinning — then she got her famous shot, which suggests the symbolism of Gandhi’s spinning wheel. The charka was central to his peaceful revolution; if Indians spun their own clothes, he said, they could boycott British textiles.
A year later on January 1, 1948, Bourke-White photographed Mahatma Gandhi for the last time, four weeks before his assassination. (This photo shoot is re-enacted in the 1982 film Gandhi.) Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed Gandhi at the same photo session. In fact, both photographers shot almost the same picture of him seated on a bed beside his two nieces, Abha and Manu (who were known as his walking sticks because they escorted him everywhere). In both photos, Abha is shown writing in a book, while Manu hands Gandhi a book to write in. Two smiling older women look on placidly. Both photographers captured the tender intimacy of this family portrait. But in Bourke-White’s photo (see Figure 25-2), the subtle mingling of light and shadow and the fact that the light seems to arise as much from within Gandhi as from an external source give her portrait a quiet mysticism and a timeless appeal. Bourke-White also included the tiny “hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil” monkey who eyes Gandhi from a table in front of the bed; Cartier-Bresson left it out. (To see the Cartier-Bresson photograph, refer to the appendix.)
On January 30, 1948, an assassin gunned down Gandhi while he was walking to a prayer meeting, supported by his nieces Abha and Manu.
|
Figure 25-2: Margaret Bourke-White’s “Gandhi with His Nieces” is one of the last photographs taken of the great Indian spiritual leader. |
|
Margaret Bourke-White / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images
Fast-Forward: The Next Generation
The influence of Life magazine’s first photographers — Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Peter Stackpole, and Carl Mydans — and of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Dorothea Lange on photojournalism and the photo essay is hard to measure. They and other between-the-wars photographers (such as Man Ray, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams) helped to give photography its identity and opened up the new art form so that the next generation could carry it into directions never imagined by the Pictorialists:
Aaron Siskind and Minor White, inspired by Abstract Expressionism (see Chapter 23), created abstract photography.
Bill Brandt, Jerry Uelsmann, and Lucas Samaras, inspired by Surrealism and Man Ray, created special-effect or fantasy photography, in which superimposition, composite images, and filters are used to create dreamlike and surreal images.
Painters like David Hockney and Robert Rauschenberg combined photography and painting.
Postmodern photographers merge photography with text and media messages and symbols and/or make pictures about pictures. For example, Cindy Sherman (see Chapter 26) photographs herself playing various stereotypical roles borrowed from cinema and advertising. Many of her works look like parodies of cinema-stills from ’40s, ’50s and ’60s B-movies.