review_things

Things As They Are -- Photojournalism in Context Since 1955

By Mary Panzer, with an afterword by Christian Caujolle

World Press Photo, Amsterdam, and Chris Boot Ltd., London, 2005

Reviewed by Francis Hodgson

World Press Photo is a charity which exists to promote photojournalism, principally by an annual competition and touring exhibition. At any time in the last thirty years there have been good reasons to fear for the future of photojournalism. First television, then the internet threatened the magazines around which the trade had centred. The digital revolution, first in image distribution, then in image capture, presented (and still presents) another huge worry. This book ends with a glance at the way that camera-phone pictures by amateurs make the front pages in cases like the Indian Ocean tsunami. (The specifically British example would be the underground bombings of July last year.) Professional photographers get around the world with astonishing speed but every western citizen now carries a camera in his pocket and knows enough about the media to make its pictures available for publication within an e-mail or two. It is easy to see how the professionals might tremble for their livelihood.

There are other worries. Photojournalism used to be the flower of photography, and often the flower of journalism, too. Editors have less money for big newsy photographic projects, now, and photographers have to look for funding elsewhere. It is in the art world that photography is the driving force, and the medium of choice. In journalism it is now just one ingredient of the digital soup. Further, the conditions of distribution have been so radically altered by the growth and aggregation of the picture libraries that the independence of the photographers and of the small agencies through which they used to work is seriously in doubt. A note of slightly nervous nostalgia in this book is understandable. It should so obviously have been called Things As They Were, for the industry will never be the same again. Yet it is not too late to understand the practical and ethical issues which photojournalism has already confronted. It’s not going to disappear, even if the conditions in which it operates are changing faster than anybody might have predicted.

Don McCullin ‘Siege of Derry - dismayed housewives watch as soldiers of the Royal Anglian Regiment charge down William Street after an outbreak of stoning’, published in the Sunday Times Magazine (UK), 1971

Photograph © Don McCullin

The specificity of this book is that the pictures and the stories in which they were grouped are presented as they were originally seen, with whole magazine pages including text and headlines overlaid or alongside. This capitalizes, no doubt perfectly deliberately, on the present mania for “design”. By presenting pretty layouts (and many are more than that, good examples of the perpetually engrossing waltz between space and pictures and text) the book takes some of the heat out of the pictures. But at what point does a well designed and copiously illustrated book like this become “coffee-table”? And if even the suggestion of triviality or superficiality is possible, what does that make of the subjects of the photographs? In this book, as always, the relations between photography and reality are uncomfortable, difficult. It is hard to escape that old familiar feeling that great suffering, great injustice, great squalor and anger and pain have been a little too easy to render on coated paper.

Reproducing original layouts entire is awkward. It implies the restoration of the original teams: writers, graphic designers, editors and picture editors, are all as important in a full layout as the photographers. The pictures are put forward here as elements for editors and designers to use, which in the real world they certainly were. But no proper credits are consistently given to the designers and the reproduced text is normally too small to read. The book thus silently perpetuates the romantic concentration on the photojournalist as an individual perhaps more free in his movements than he has ever really been.

Sebastião Salgado ‘Serra Pelada – A barranco (plot) of 6sq m in the pit has to be worked and cleared vertically, therefore by hand. The result is this swarming pandemonium, almost beyond human imagination’, published in the Sunday Times Magazine (UK), 1987

Photographs © Sebastião Salgado / Amazonas Images / nbpictures

But of course that is one strand of the story. However much one looks at photojournalism as a sub-branch of the modern media industries or modern visual culture, it is hard to escape the extraordinary people at its heart. Alfred Eisenstaedt, asked in the BBC series The Master Photographers how he felt photographing Hitler, answered for the whole profession: “When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.”

This is not specially or even mainly a book of war photographs. It has its share of them, however, and puts them in a thought-provoking context. The editors are sensitive enough to deal well with possible charges like Western centredness, or of magazines being far from neutral arenas. They are clear in what they are concentrating upon: connected series of pictures not individual images, and images published mainly in magazines. Here is Don McCullin’s report from Derry for the Sunday Times in 1971, brilliant picture after brilliant picture. A squad of howling soldiers charges past two doorways in which civilian ladies take the only cover they can find. A pale bollard in the left half balances the pale doorway on the right. The movement is so wholly from left to right that even the cowering ladies lean that way, as though blown over by the wind-wake of the rushing soldiers. McCullin saw black soldiers fighting white civilians, a shocking reversal of the colonial norm. And we would all get used, in time, to his portrayal of conflict as white against white. It takes an effort, even in front of the magazine spreads reproduced, to remember just how shocking this was. Photography would never be able to analyse, for example, the failure of local government in Northern Ireland in great detail. But nobody could see these pictures in London and think that there was just a little civil disorder going on over the sea.

The focus upon magazines may have been a mistake. It looks better in the early years of this overview than it does at the end. So many photographers now regard the book as the proper complete expression of their work, and magazine publication only as a necessary intermediary stage, that the story is somewhat falsified by concentrating on the old-fashioned model of publishing. By what standard, for example, can one consider Robert Frank’s fundamental book, The Americans (published right at the beginning of the period covered here, in 1958) not to be photojournalism?

Richard Avedon ‘The Family – George Bush and James Angleton’, published in Rolling Stone (USA), 1976

On the other hand, many might be surpised by the inclusion of Richard Avedon’s 1976 issue of Rolling Stone with its dozens of apparently plain straight portraits on a white ground of the American political establishment. My own view is that this broader, more inclusive view is important and interesting: too many views of photojournalism shy away from the plain fact that looking with burning critical interest at the world need not necessarily mean looking only at gore. Here we have also Bruce Weber’s astonishing series of the US Olympic team before the Los Angeles Games of 1984. The hero-worshipping point of view is quite openly derived from Leni Riefenstahl’s photography of the Olympians of the Nazi games in 1936. The camera is lower than the athletes, who are seen in the kind of luscious mid-tones deliberately conceived to render muscle. Yet Weber managed to query his own make-believe by the simplest means of all. The tarpaulin backdrop of his mobile studio is in almost every shot. It is partly a grubby theatre curtain, but it is also a quote from the crude illusions of nineteenth century portrait studios. The camera may always tell the truth, these pictures say, but whose truth and which truth is not always so plain. That’s a salutary thought to bear in mind perhaps particularly in front of war photography.

This book, perhaps inevitably, makes too many arbitrary judgments of what’s in or out to count as a critical history, yet it is plainly an honourable and serious book with ambitions above the coffee-table. That it struggles to situate itself naturally may be its undoing. Both journalism and photography used to be mainly learnt in the doing. Navigating the precarious reefs of technique, of law, of ethics and opportunity and marketing was done by the seat of the pants. But each discipline now has a large and serious academic and semi-academic hinterland. It is asking for trouble to step back from the red-hot immediacy of photojournalism in process without fully moving to a cool concentration of dispassionate analysis. In the end, this is an exhilarating tale of photographic knights-errant on quest, and a good-looking collection of some hundred and twenty picture stories, but it skirts more issues than it covers in depth.

Francis Hodgson, who is based in London, writes regularly on photography for the Financial Times and other publications.

Things As They Are - Photojournalism in Context Since 1955 by Mary Panzer is published by Chris Boot in association with World Press Photo, price £45.00

Book available with 30% discount on www.chrisboot.com