Photography - Charles Darwent takes issue with
a view of the century on camera
It may be unwise to judge a book by its cover, but it is not necessarily wrong to do so by its size. Century, Phaidon's new homage to the photography of the past 100 years, is, by anybody's standards, a big book: very big, in fact, measuring some 400 cubic inches in volume and weighing in at almost exactly a stone. Given its aim - roughly speaking, to provide a year-by-year gazetteer of an entire century's worth of photographs - a certain gigantism was inevitable. But the book's size also hints at some of the critical problems we face in looking at photography at the end of the century.
Its subtitle gives the game away. One hundred years of human progress, regression, suffering and hope is a tall order for any single work to fill: an equivalent volume in words, written with the same declared ambitions, would probably be laughed out of court. The kind of truisms that photography has spawned over the past century suggest how a book of photographs might hope to get away with it, though. The idea that pictures speak louder than words, say, or that cameras never lie, hints at the primacy photography has come to hold in the public imagination over written reportage. The sheer mass of Bruce Bernard's book suggests that its vision is encyclopaedic, panoptic; and bound up in these suggestions are others of its factual neutrality - if you like, of its honesty.
Of course, Century, like photography itself, is neither neutral nor especially honest. The book, like its subject, is susceptible to editing: in one of those apologias that does not really apologise for anything, Bernard owns up to this. For all its size, Century is his own vision of a particular way of seeing, shaped by his personal editorial foibles - a political distaste for Richard Nixon, for example, or a desire to "avoid the award-winning image". But these little admissions are set alongside larger and more worrying ones, notably his desire to strike the "correct [Bernard's italics] balance" between images of pleasantness and unpleasantness: in other words, to recreate the century in his own image.
It is an enormous admission for such an enormous book to make. What it reveals is the ease with which individual photographs - mute, made by a dispassionate machine and thus freed from the suspicion of moral agenda - can be manipulated to form a picture that is larger than them- selves. Put a photograph of the youthful Adolf Hitler by itself, for example, and it tells you one story; juxtapose it (as Bernard does) with another, from the same year, of Ramsay MacDonald, and that story suddenly changes. The problem is whether we, as viewers, notice the change.
If we don't, then it may be for another reason suggested by Century's bulk. The art historian Tim Clark has analysed the way in which the growth of a market economy in France during the mid-19th century led to the development of department stores: the vitrines of these, in their turn, brought about a change not simply in the things that the man (including the painter) in the street could look at, but in the way in which he saw them. Study anything from a Manet odalisque to a Degas dancer and you will find evidence of Clark's commodified gaze: an entire way of looking that has been brought about by a change in market economics.
Look at Century's 1,200 or so photographs and you will see evidence of the equivalent change in our own time: that is to say, the vast outpouring of mass-produced images from a universe of mass-produced cameras. The question you might like to ask yourself as you flick through these is whether the change in the amount that we can see has also led to a change in the way we see it. Are late-20th-century photographs, as industrialised products, different things from the hand-produced images that preceded them - not merely in their number, but in what they have come to mean? More to the point, has our experience of photography in this century been the uniform one implied by this book, or has there been a cumulative change in the way we see pictures?
One thing that Century makes cruelly apparent is how quickly photographs become dull when seen in great numbers and out of context. And yet the book recreates precisely the context in which we have come to see photography at the end of the century: images coming at us from all sides, made by many hands, intended to perform an immeasurable variety of tasks. To offset the ennui of this, we are forced to up the ante: Bernard, interestingly enough, does so by turning to words. On page 199 is a photograph of a Ku Klux Klan lynching, described as "unsurpassed as an image of human vileness"; on page 421 is another of a Nazi hanging in the occupied Ukraine over the legend, "Perhaps the worst photograph of all". It is a small sample of the images in Century (any sample would be) but it is nonetheless a telling one. Bombarded with images, we need titillating: we lose interest in looking. The danger, maybe, is that we may eventually also lose interest in seeing.
"Century" is published by Phaidon Press at £29.95
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