Photography - The art form may look simple enough, but what is it that makes a good photographer a great one? The curator of the Getty's collection, Weston Naef, explains
There are 1,600 photographers in the Getty collection, representing the history of photography from the early 1840s onwards. A new book and the accompanying exhibition at the Getty Museum in Santa Monica, California, selects just 38 artists we have defined as "Photographers of Genius". How were they chosen? First, they had to be held in depth at the Getty. They had to be ahead of their time. They had to exert a measurable influence on their contemporaries or successors. They had to prove they could repeat their performance at will.
Perhaps the greatest genius was William Henry Fox Talbot, active between 1835 and 1877. He devised a two-step process by which multiple positive paper prints could be made from a single negative. He was also the first to recognise that multiple paper copies could be mounted on to, or adjacent to, a page of printed text. Photographs and books have been connected ever since.
Yet each photographer selected has advanced the art of photography. The early French photographer Hippolyte Bayard, a contemporary of Fox Talbot, was the first to put his own voice into his work. Each one of his pictures says: "This is me, this is an expression of my inner self." Meanwhile, Roger Fenton, a Briton, was the first person to make a speciality of working indoors. He achieved interior photographs which were extraordinary.
The American Lewis Hine realised that the world could be changed through photographs. His work caused the outlawing of child labour across 13 American states, his photographs proof that the law must be changed. To anyone who claims that they are simply documentary evidence, I ask: do you not consider Doffer Boys (1909) a work of art? Although Hine was collecting visual evidence for the National Child Labour Committee, he took an artist's pride in the quality of his pictures.
Alfred Stieglitz, also an American, was the first successfully to repeat many pictures that together make up one portrait of a person. Each photograph in his 1918-19 sequence of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe is as successful as the others. Artists before him may have taken many pictures of the same subject, and come up with one masterpiece. But Stieglitz made picture after picture creative and arresting.
Edward Weston redefines imagination, making pictures where one thing is continuously seen in the shape of another. We selected his Nude, Santa Monica (1936) not only because it is an abstract, full of triangles, but because it is also an extraordinarily tender rendering of the person he was in love with at the time. It is on the cover of our book, because we believe art should start close to home. It was taken on the sun deck of Weston's home in Santa Monica Canyon, five miles away from both the Getty in Los Angeles and our original site in Malibu.
Another American, Dorothea Lange, was the first artist to use photographs to explore relationships between people. The mother with her three small children (Migrant Mother; 1936) is probably the most famous photograph made in America. It shows Florence Owens, a migrant agricultural worker, and three of her eight children. Florence is actually gripping the tent pole of her humble dwelling in order to balance herself. Her expression came to symbolise the despair of an entire generation of working people during the Great Depression. The picture shows Lange not only had the technical skills of an experienced portraitist, but also the emotional depth of a great artist.
And Usher Fellig, an Austrian immigrant to New York, known always simply as Weegee, was the first to make the act of being a voyeur into an artistic statement. He shows couples kissing (Palace Theatre; c.1952), making love, sleeping outdoors on fire escapes, being arrested after a crime; in short, his work reveals people who are being seen when they did not want to be seen.
Photographers of Genius at the Getty (Getty Publications, £45 hardback, £27 paperback)
Weston Naef gives a public lecture on the same theme at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 on Friday 9 July at 7pm. Free
"Photographers of Genius at the Getty" runs at the J Paul Getty Museum, Santa Monica, California until 25 July
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