The Genius of Photography: Episode Two
Photography became an organ of propoganda, and in troubled times documented what it meant to be human.
One of the best sellers of 1925, Art Forms in Nature revealed in detail the precision engineering that underpinned the vegetable world. A compulsion to make an encyclopedic record. Systematic and accurate records of places, people, and things had been one of photographys trump cards from the outset. Anna Atkins catalogue of algie - just four years after photography's invention. Within a decade used to record the criminal underworld - police mugshots. Photographic typologies. Typology is about comparisons - you only get to know something if you can compare it to something else. Record each object at the exactly the same viewpoint. Typologies discipline photography's unruly tendencies, in order to create 'pure' documents; just the facts and nothing else. Bernd & Hilla Becher- Blast Furnaces and water towers.
Germany 1920 August Sander - human typologies. Commercial portrait photographer working since the turn of the century. In 1929 put down his stamp as a modernist with his collection 'Face of the Times'. An obsessive collector. All occupied same space within the frame; you were invited to look at the differences between everybody. He organised into 7 types, such as farmers, then subcategorised - young farmers, farmer's child and mother. The unspoken behind sanders pictures is the chaotic condition of germany in the 1920's. The Weimar Rupublic - a society in meltdown. Hyper-inflation, mass unemployment, political violence on the streets. All of Sander's subjects would have lived with the consequences of that chaos. The notary stands erect in his once-elegant overcoat. Its begun to lose its shape but he fills it out as if it has not changed in any way. A man who attempts to preserve his position, at least for the camera - as if to say I'm no less than I always was.
Alexander Rodchenko - When the Bolsheviks came to power he declared painting to be dead, and instead turned to photography. Not content with traditional approaches to photography. A new society demanded new ways of seeing. Compact, handheld, lightweight cameras like the legendary leica. The leica was so light it opened up a new freedom - you could shoot upwards, downwards, sideways - suddenly freed from the tripod. Rodchenko - the need to reject 'belly-button' photography - most amateur cameras were held at waist level with a viewfinder into which you look down (such as Kodak Brownie). Instead, make very apparent that you are photographing the world very differently, so that the viewer would be encouraged to take part in a revolution of perception. Radical photographic style was combined with cutting-edge graphics in a magazine called 'USSR in Construction' - designed by Rodchenko. A showcase of political propaganda, glorifying the achievements of the soviet system. The magazine displays Rodchenko's mastery of photographic montage, a graphic technique that took its cue from cinematic montage. Rodchenko's montages treated photographs as 'raw footage', suppressing their individuality, collectivising their energies, cutting, pasting, retouching and rephotographing them, to conjure up dizzing visions of the future. Photo montage also shows up photographs for what they really are - mute documents whose meaning remains fluid. Photography's functional record can be harnessed in one way or another. Rodchenko harnessed photography to greatest effect in an issue of USSR in Construction devoted to the white sea canal. Trumpeted at home and abroad as a triumph of soviet engineering and enlightened soviet penal policies. The canal would be built by criminals and other social undesirables, who would be rehabilitated through labour. Rodchenko travelled to the canal to take the photographs that would provide the raw material for this masterpiece of political propaganda. Photo montage changes the original intention and meaning. Rodchenkos expert post-production - doesn't look like a montage until you see the originals - made the unsmiling workers appear to be smiling.
Paris - Attempting to preserve a society about to disappear. Eugine Atget. Spent 30 years recording backstreet to shopfront before it was swept away to redevelopment. By the 1920s had compiled a unique typology of old Paris, consisting of 10,000 images. His equipment and technique was archaic by the 1920s. Still making albumen prints (which you can make in sunshine). Behind the times, but still a commercial photographer, outside his studio he advertised documents for artists, reference material for illustrations and cartoons. However modest their intentions, Atget's photographs achieved something far greater. Atget moved into documents of a different range of reality. Cautiously explored the borderline between one kind of reality and another.
Man Ray - Pushing deep into the territory of the unreal. Studio on same street at Atget. He thought the camera was not a machine for making documents, but an instrument for displaying dreams, desire and the medium's unconcious mind. A natural maverik - thought of all different ways to be a photographer that no-one had thought of before. In tune with dadaism and surrealism. Placed objects on photographic paper in a darkroom, then briefly turned the light on. No camera involved to make these images. Late 1920's solarisation process - makes people look as though their faces are aluminium. They become as sleek and metallic super-people; slightly inhuman and robotic. Man Ray got in at the ground floor of the surrealist enterprise thanks to his friendship with artist Marcel Duchamps and an early encounter with one of his most seminal works.
Dust Breeding delights in photography's infinite capacity for ambiguity and mocks its obligations as a sober recorder of reality. No sense of scale or reference to anything we'd be familiar with. We're up perhaps above clouds; we're looking at some bleak terrain, but its being offered to us as something between an art work and a document. If it's an artwork it's haunted by the idea of the document; if it's a document it's haunted by the idea of the artwork.
In 1926 the surrealist (Man Ray) and the maker of documents (Atget) met. An encounter between photography's past and present which would have a profound influence on its future. Man Ray bought about 50 of Atget's photographs and sparked something of a fashion for Atget's work in avant-garde circles in Paris. The surrealists were interested in the idea of found objects - something ordinary taken out of context so that it would appear very strange and project you into another conciousness and another understanding. Old photographs were terrific found objects for the surrealists. Full of things people didn't know what or who they were. Atget died a few months after his discovery.
By then, his documents had been appropriated by Europe's avante-garde. At the influencial film and photo show in Stuttgart 1929 Atget's prints were shown alongside works by Man Ray and others. Britain was photographically 'asleep' during the 20's. All the action was in Germany and Russia. In Russia and Germany the 'action' was about to take a sinister turn. Stalin's great terror, unleashed in 1934, had created a legion of the damned; heroes of the soviet union now declared enemies of the people. First they were liquidated, then removed from history. Propaganda publications had to be kept up to date, as arrest followed arrest. Rodchenko, the master of montage, was now forced to doctor books that he himself had created, using black ink to turn apparatchiks into 'unpeople'. In Germany, humanity was facing obliteration of another kind. August Sander, who could give a black circus performer the same human dignity as a burgermaster inevitably fell foul of those who were planning a master race. The Nazis had their own ideas of what photographic typologies were for. Cataloging racial types, for example. A government that prized sameness and a highly idealised version of what its people ought to be simply could not stand all of the idiosyncrasy you see in Sander's pictures. The Nazis banned Sander's book, and the printing plates were destroyed. But the further Germany descended into its collective madness, the harder Sander clung to his typology. The Nazis may have had no use for him in their system, but he made a place for them in his. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power he documented them too. He photographed them with the same clarity as anybody else, as he did the Jewish people who came to him. Sander's son was a communist, and when he was arrested in 1934 Sander arranged to take his picture in his prison cell. He died, still a prisoner, 10 years later. Sander photographed his death mask. It appears in the category called The Last People.
America in the 1930s was in the grip of its own crisis. Walker Evans used his camera to lay them bare.
Penny Picture Display,
Savannah 1936. - An image of American identity, of democracy, each individual the same size, therefore each individual having the same importance - The positive interpretation. A rigid structure, each person in their individual little cell - The negative interpretation. That's the genius of Walker Evans; he's pretending that he's just giving you the facts, but he's, by the choice of the facts, influencing how you understand the world. The straightforwardness of his photographs is deceptive. He spent time in Paris exploring the latest trends in avante-garde photography. When he returned home he started photographing in a style straight from the pages of the film and photo catalogue, but he found his own distinctive voice thanks to an Old Master - Eugine Atget. He had seen some of Atget's negatives that had been taken to America, and after seeing these put away his handheld camera and started working like Atget with an old large-format view camera. It slowed him down, but made him look more closely. Like Atget, he understand that objects are hugely evocative of the lives of the people to whom they are attached.
In 1935 Walker Evans, along with other leading photographers, was commissioned to produce propaganda images for the Farm Securities Agency, set up to ease the effects of the depression in rural America. The images were taken at the behest of the government to support government relief efforts; there's an obvious strategy to portray the government in a very positive light - not only the government, but also the recipients of relief. The most famous examples occur with the idealisation of the Dust Bowl Refugees in the photography of Dorothea Lange, in which in the six photographs in the series she proceeds to reduce the size of the family which she identified in her captions as seven people, down to three young children, one of whom is an infant, and thereby the family suddenly conforms to middle class standards on family size. One of Evan's classic images shows the gulf that seperated him from mainstream FSA photography. Allie Mae Burroughs - a sharecropper's wife in Alabama in 1936. She's shown against the weatherboarded house that she lived in, and her face is as weathered as the wood. You can see that her eyes are screwed up against fairly fierce southern light, and it's the same fierceness of the camera lens; it's just sheer direct fact. She has equal human presence as the person behind the camera.
Though he aspired to the directness of an Atget or a Sander, Evan's understanding of documentary photography was more complex. For him, there was nothing simple about a photographic document. Documentary had come to mean two things; firstly that it was delivering the truth, and that it was a social agent that was going to make life better for everybody. Evans hated both of these ideas; the reason he insisted on calling it documentary style or documentary asthetic was precisely to make the point that it just
looks like the facts; it isn't objective.
When Evans photographed the Burrough's house, the complexities and contradictions of this documentary style were revealed. Evans didn't simply record what was in front of him; he rearranged the scene to minimise the squalor, elevating simple objects into iconic symbols of domesticity. As he worked, the photograph crossed the line from document into artwork. Evans readily molded reality to fit his personal vision, but couldn't make that vision conform to FSA propaganda requirements. In 1937 he was sacked.
By then, the high hopes of the 1920s had given way to the low dishonesty of the 1930s, and after that came total war. British photographer Bill Brandt had made his name working within the documentary discipline of photo magazines like Picture Post but also walked on photography's wild side in the Paris studio of Man Ray. Late in life, Brandt and Man Ray were reintroduced to each other, and at one point Man Ray asked Brandt what he had learnt while he had been his assistant. Brandt replied 'Not so much when you were present, but you used to go out so much, so I rifled through you drawers, and I learnt a great deal while you weren't in the studio'. What he did learn from Man Ray was the surrealist pleasure in quirky juxtaposition, but also understanding that a picture can be like a sculpture; it can represent nothing more than the artist's desire to represent something.
In his documentary work Brandt would ask people to participate - such as pretending to be asleep - as well as honestly recording what he found there; Brandt is the inventor of that strange halfway house between truth and fiction. Brandt sees this new social dislocation is surrealist terms; surrealist events unfolding in London during the blackout and the blitz. Suddenly this is a dream city, where there is no illumination except the moon, and suddenly there are all these railway stations packed with people, but they're asleep.
In an age of machines, and machine-like ideologys, photography had found its own future by reaching back into its 19th century past. And by preserving the human in inhuman times, photography had apparently proved it was a humanistic rather than a mechanistic medium; a claim that would be tested in the years immediately ahead.
My Response
A very interesting episode, from what I can gather the two main threads of discussion being photographs as 'documents' and as 'propaganda'. One type of document is the typology - a cataloguing of similar subjects with the exact same framing and viewpoint. This allows comparisons to be drawn between the subjects, and the differences as well as the similarities to be noted.
It is interesting how August Sander's typology of the German people catalogued individuals, but also made a record of the condition of Germany at the time, which was etched onto each person. Also evident on the person was the way they tried to shed this record, and preserve their old self. Sander's depiction of all and sundry irked the Nazis - his book was banned and the glass plates destroyed.
I found Brandt's treatment of documents intriguing. Rather than just photograph people surviving in war-time Britain by sleeping in the underground stations, which would be compelling in itself, he took the photographic opportunity one step further by incorporating surrealist elements; creating a strange surreal/document hybrid. This blurring of genres is something I'd like to explore in my own work.
Photography's manipulation by the government in the form of propaganda was intriguing but at the same time alarming. From the subtle, careful choices of including just the right number of people in an image depicting 'family' in the work of Lange, to Rodchenko's post-production where he turned a frown upside-down, and later destruction of his own work by Stalin.
I enjoyed the two contrasting interpretations of Walker Evans'
Penny Picture Display. This image to me sums up the ambiguity of a photographic document, and how your own experiences might influence the way you view and compare the individual frames.
