A Brief History of Photography
The History of Photography in 5 Minutes
Technologies
In an important sense, documentary as we know it only really emerged in the later 1920s and 1930s. When Roger Fenton produced his photographic record of the Crimean War in 1855, the images he made consisted of posed portraits or immobile scenes. There are no dead or wounded bodies among his images and no photographs of ‘action’. Fenton’s most famous photograph – The Valley of the Shadow of Death – depicts a rough track strewn with cannon balls, but no other signs of human presence. Ten years later, a lot more corpses are evident in the photographs from the American Civil War. But it was more than 50 years before photographers could really depict dynamic action. For instance, Robert Capa’s photographs of the Spanish Civil War of 1936 puts the viewer right in the thick of events. His Death of a Loyalist Soldier apparently captures the instant of this man’s death and is taken a matter of yards from the event.
Capa’s most famous dictum was ‘[i]f your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough’. The British authorities were concerned to ensure that Fenton did not record anything that would be bad for morale, but even had he wished, he could not in fact have made a photograph like Death of a Loyalist Soldier. Fenton worked with a heavy, large-format camera that required a tripod, resulting in a static point of view. What is more, the wet-collodion glass plates he used required rapid processing once exposed before they dried (he took a darkroom mounted on a horse-drawn wagon with him into the field). His technology almost guaranteed a fixed and formal image.
Some transformations in photographic technology occurred in the intervening period, but the key changes took place from the mid-1920s. From this period, small lightweight cameras with good lenses became available. At this point, many photographers began to use an Ermanox, a small-format plate camera, which could be held under certain conditions. Although its use did not become widespread until the 1940s, the key change came with the creation of the Leica camera, originally created to test exposure times for movie film. The Leica transformed possibilities in photojournalism.
Firstly, it utilized 35-millimetre movie film in small metal canisters; this considerably reduced camera size and meant that the photographer could carry and expose a large number of frames with minimal time elapsing between them. (Some photographers working today expose 300 or 400 frames a day.) Secondly, the small format enabled photographers to work in a mobile, fluid way with the camera held at eye level (itself an innovation – prior to this time most cameras were positioned lower). At the end of the 1920s, flashbulbs were introduced, allowing work in poor light conditions (flash photography had previously involved combustible magnesium powder in a dish – a flash in the pan – resulting in an intense burst of light and dense smoke). Photographers could now photograph events from the inside and often went unobserved.
The number of frames possible also meant that a premium was no longer placed on getting everything right in advance, since the best image could be selected later from among the numerous exposures.
Fenton’s images provided the basis for engravings in the press. This was a laborious process, taking one or more engravers days to produce a plate from the original image. The images also appeared in limited deluxe folio editions after his return from the war. His material was neither rapidly nor widely disseminated. Capa’s photographs, in contrast, soon appeared in magazines and papers across the world. Another technical transformation had made this possible. Before the 1880s, it was not commercially feasible to reproduce photographs and type on the same page. Photo-printing systems were available a decade earlier, but the half-tone screen, developed during the 1880s in Europe and the USA, came to dominate newspaper and magazine reproduction until the introduction of digital technology a century later. Half-tone screens are made by interposing a sheet of glass marked with a grid between a photographic negative and a zinc plate rendered sensitive to light.
In this process, a photograph is transformed into an image composed of numerous dots in various sizes, which can then be printed in ink, allowing it to be combined with type. This system created the conditions for photography’s emergence as a massimage form. It was, however, slow to catch on, partially, at least, because hand-engraved images continued to signify quality. The press employed photographs on a regular basis only from the beginning of the 20th century. The first paper that was illustrated throughout with photographs, The Daily Mirror, appeared in 1904. When photomechanical printing did become widespread, it reinforced the seemingly agentless ‘objectivity’ of the press.
It was during the later 1920s and 1930s that the important mass photo-magazines predicated on a new educated, urban audience appeared. These were publications structured around photographic stories that covered topical news events and everyday life. In 1935, it became possible to send photographs by telegraph, images taken a great distance away could then be sent to the home publication and printed more-or-less simultaneously with the events they depicted.
These magazines became one of the most important cultural forms of the 20th century. Many of the central innovations in the photomagazines arose in Germany. By 1928, the Berliner Illustierte Zietung sold 2.2 million copies. The Nazi takeover of the country in 1933 had the effect of dispersing key editors, photographers, and layout specialists throughout the world. In 1936, the American publication Life appeared, selling nearly half a million copies. At the end of 1938, Picture Post was launched in Britain (with refugees from Hitler prominent among the staff ). The French photo magazine VU commenced publication in 1928, and Paris-Match was launched in 1949. USSR in Construction (in three languages), published from the late 1920s, embodied a Stalinist vision of socialism in one country, while employing iconic images and a dynamic layout. Arbeiter Illustierte Zeitung, a picture magazine allied to the German Communist Party, which regularly featured photomontages by John Heartfield, along with investigative photojournalism, reached a circulation of half a million. After Hitler came to power it was published outside Germany and clandestinely smuggled into the country. In 1951, Drum appeared in South Africa: this was an important magazine that employed black writers and photographers and which was extensively read by a black urban audience. It is said that, after the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro declared he wanted something similar to Life, and Revolución was born.
The documenting photography that appeared in these magazines was frequently infused with a sheer sense of visual wonder. The editorial in the first issue of Life declared that its aim was to enable its audience:
[t]o see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things . . . to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.
In an important sense, despite the differences in the ideology of the photo-magazines, this editorial provides a programmatic statement for the new documentary work that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. Documentary photographers put the new technologies to work in recording things that had not previously been depicted.
This tendency was particularly evident in the early picture magazines’ fascination with the first published image of this or that. Picture Post, for example, might feature ‘the first full picture story of an operation’, or ‘the only photograph ever taken inside the high court’.
Much documentary photography, especially between the world wars, was conceived as a poetic form. (Grierson saw documentary in this way: the film Night Mail, which he produced in 1936, had a score by Benjamin Britten and a commentary by the poet W. H. Auden.) Many key documentary photographers – including Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Humphrey Spender, Brassaı ¨, and André Kertész – thought of their work as a new kind of poetry.
In this manner, much documentary photography combined a campaigning vision with an aesthetic of the everyday. In part, at least, this conception stems from the emergence of documentary photography alongside Surrealism. Documentary photographers were interested in finding the extraordinary in ordinary life. Rather than high-flown subjects, the vision focused on the way shadows fall on empty coffee cups, life on the streets of the modern city, or the oddities associated with popular leisure. Themes from everyday life played a particularly central role in the documentary vision before the mass commercialization of popular culture, which really took hold, if unevenly, after World War II.
For the best part of 50 years, these magazines, and many others like them, were a feature of the cultural landscape, providing outlets for investigative photojournalism and documentary. Some have suggested that television killed the photo-magazine. However, what seems to have been more particularly responsible for their demise was the spread of commercial television, which stripped them of advertising revenue. By the 1970s (France seems to have been an exception), these magazines had been replaced by the Sunday supplements, more or less entirely geared for advertisements.
