The portrait

Some photographers have a passion for people and a fascination for faces. Their natural subject is the portrait. We have a very powerful urge to see ourselves and people have always been the favourite subject of photography. We see pictures of people in every magazine and newspaper, in numerous books, galleries and museums. In central London the huge National Portrait Gallery is dedicated solely to pictures of the famous. But what makes a photograph of someone a portrait?

What is a portrait?

A portrait attempts to express the character of a person and pin down the sitter in the hierarchy of their world, socially and physically, showing status, authority and significance. A portrait offers insight into a person beyond the details of appearance, revealing unknown sides of his or her character or showing a fresh perspective on someone we know well.

To create a portrait you need more than someone just standing in front of your camera. Having someone framed in the viewfinder and clicking the shutter doesn’t mean you’ve taken a portrait of that person. The result is often just a composition or a likeness revealing little other than features, location and outfit – though history can add weight to these images as places change, clothes become dated or the person famous.

Many things stand in the way of creating a portrait. When being photographed, most people have a self-awareness about the presence of the camera and present a habitual expression and pose to the lens that they know will look satisfactory. Despite our best efforts, though, it is impossible not to betray some small clues to our true identity.

To take a portrait the photographer must somehow search and penetrate beyond a sitter’s guard. The photographer Eve Arnold said that the portrait photographer should ‘get into the soul of the person’.

Photographer, sitter and viewer

There is always more than one person in a portrait: there’s the sitter and the photographer. Together they create the portrait, it is a record of their encounter. But is it a meeting between equals?

‘My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.’

Richard Avedon.

John Szarkowski introduced a book of portraits by saying that ‘a portrait is a battle between two wills for the control of the sitter’s soul’, seeing taking portraits as a fierce wrestling bout. Some portraits do indeed reflect this battle; in others the encounter appears to be far more collaborative.

Alastair Thain, Richard Long, 1990

Finding himself dissatisfied with the quality of image he could obtain with a standard large-format camera, Alastair Thain decided to construct his own. In a single-minded mission to achieve photographic excellence, he built a series of massive large-format cameras with which to take portraits. He shoots on black-and-white, ultra-high-definition satellite reconnaissance film. This portrait of artist Richard Long (opposite) is from a series of pictures of artists, actors and musicians published in the book Skindeep. Thain photographed Long in front of one of his own mud-circle artworks.

In addition to the sitter and the photographer, the viewer is intimately involved in a portrait. The viewer completes a portrait. All prior knowledge of the sitter colours the viewer’s vision. Everything known about the sitter is imprinted in the viewer’s mind, including other images of the subject. Knowledge and the prism of history magnify photographs, changing how they are viewed. Viewers react to an incredibly simple photograph of a familiar face or famous person in a totally different way from the way they would to the same composition of someone unknown, seeing one as an insightful portrait and the other as merely a snap.

Great photographic portraits create a unique, unforgettable chemistry, formed by the relationship and interaction between the sitter, the photographer and the viewer.

Questioning photographic portraits

Does the photograph reflect a unique meeting of photographer and sitter, or could anyone have taken the picture? Who has the balance of power – the sitter or the photographer? Who’s in charge?

Does a picture of a person reveal and give insight beyond the details of appearance? Is the sitter happy in their own skin? Do we see their essence? Are we offered an original view? Is the sitter unveiled or is the sitter merely flattered? Do we see the familiar or an unfamiliar face of that person? Is it possible not to pose? Is it possible to reveal nothing – is there such a thing as a ‘blank expression’? Are we captivated, touched or moved by a photograph of someone? How much does it reward intimate and repeated viewing – how demanding is a picture?

A portrait preserves the subject and photographer for posterity. How will the sitter and the photographer be judged by a future audience – when both are long dead? Does a long-dead sitter speak to you across the years in their portrait?

The tools of the portrait photographer

The tools chosen by the photographer have a vital influence on the final image. Photographers choose to work with flash light, tungsten light or daylight, in studios or ‘on location’, and select particular cameras for the effect they will have on the image. Some photographers choose the fierce scrutiny of the large-format camera, others the Lomo camera. Some choose soft lighting, vivid colour or to manipulate pictures digitally after they have been taken. Great portrait photographers select a camera, light source and method of output for their inbuilt creative character, finding their own way of combining and using these tools to create a unique means of portraying people.

Face value

Photographers approach the ceremony of portrait-taking in different ways – seeking revelation and intimacy. Many concentrate on the face, relying on the details of features and expression. ‘Head shots’ can have great intensity. If taken with a medium- or large-format camera, they give a striking level of detail about the landscape of the face. We seldom if ever stare at length at others – even loved ones; the head shot lets us do this, giving the viewer a great visual intimacy with the sitter’s eyes, eyelids, mouth, hair and pores of the skin.

Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh (see www.masters-of-photography.com) used a 10x8-inch format camera to take head shots that he then printed larger than life, making his sitters look powerful and monumental on a Mount Rushmore scale. American artist Chuck Close (see Chuck Close, Daguerreotypes [Alberico Cetti Serbettoni Editore, Italy, 2002]) revels in extraordinary human detail, creating huge close-ups using daguerreotypes, a process that was used for the very first portraits over 150 years ago. Their intense clarity gives the viewer the opportunity to examine his sitters’ faces microscopically.

Details

Very telling portraits have been created examining key details of a sitter – the hands of sculptors and artists, the fists of boxers, and the feet of dancers and sportsmen. Bill Brandt photographed in tight close-up the eyes of visionary artists including Henry Moore, Max Ernst, Georges Braque and Alberto Giacometti. The ephemera of a person’s life can also be very revealing.

Hayley Leonard, Nan’s Hands, 2004

‘I set out to take a portrait of my grandmother that revealed her personality and character. I didn’t want it to be posed and I wanted to retain the atmosphere of her cosy flat. I used available light together with one tungsten light that I bounced to add further soft lighting. The picture was taken with a Bronica medium-format camera, with the lens set to a wide aperture to gain a short depth of field.’ Leonard is a photographer and designer working in Liverpool.

The plain-background portrait

Photographers often choose to photograph people against white or neutral backgrounds, a method of working used throughout the history of photography. The person stands isolated from his or her natural environment, allowing the viewer a closer inspection of pose, dress and face. Richard Avedon (see www.richardavedon.com) spent five summers creating a series of plain background portraits which were compiled in his famous book In the American West. Avedon shattered many myths and stereotypes with these images. There are no heroic cowboys; instead, he reveals an America populated with sinewy manual workers seen exhausted with toil, drifters and the unemployed, the disappointed and disenchanted.

Avedon took the In the American West pictures in different locations but always used the same methods. They were all taken with a Deardorff 8x10-inch format plate camera, on bright days but in the shade so that there are no direct or strong shadows.

Avedon kept a constant vision and stuck to the same working methods throughout his career, photographing the famous, the wealthy, the poor and the condemned in exactly the same way against white backdrops. The portrait of Ronald Fischer neatly echoes his portrait from twenty years earlier of walnut-faced poet W.H. Auden, who, similarly centred in the frame, stands on a bleached background of snow in a New York street, his face and body flecked with falling snowflakes.

Irving Penn (see www.masters-of-photography.com) also loved the simplicity of the plain-background portrait, feeling that its straightforwardness gave his pictures an honesty. Penn’s photographs are lit solely by the daylight falling into the studio, or with studio lights arranged to ape the effects of his skylight. He pushed together two stage flats, giving his subjects a corner in which to compose themselves. It is a stark stage, with nowhere to hide, as Penn’s camera traps them; he has them cornered.

The studio portrait

The studio offers the photographer great control of the mood of an image. Cecil Beaton created amazing and stylish studio backdrops in the 1930s from cheap materials – torn paper, cellophane and Bacofoil – predating Warhol’s silver studio by three decades. Madame Yevonde and Angus McBean used the studio to stage fantastically idiosyncratic portraits. McBean created strange landscapes sculpted with sand in front of painted backdrops of stormy skies. His portraits are dreamlike pictures with odd confusions of scale, his subjects often appearing with their heads trapped in bell jars. Madame Yevonde photographed English society beauties in vivid colour wearing flowing Greek and Roman costumes, lit with great theatricality. Her aristocratic sitters appear more than happy to be seen as goddesses.

Richard Avedon, Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9, 1981

© The Richard Avedon Foundation There are few smiles to be seen against the empty nowhere of Avedon’s bleached white backdrop used throughout In the American West, with many of the people seeming prematurely aged. The most famous of these pictures is of beekeeper Ronald Fischer – a picture that was sketched and planned meticulously before execution. The beekeeper stares at us unflinchingly from the centre of the frame despite the fact that some of his swarm are crawling into his ears (opposite).

Irving Penn, Joe Louis, 1948

Having famously adapted his studio to create a stark, acute corner backdrop for his portraits, Penn shot world-famous and much-photographed celebrities, producing very revealing pictures. In his portrait of champion boxer Joe Louis (opposite), the boxer looks not only vulnerable but defeated. Was this Penn’s intention: providing a way to see the inner child of a great athlete?

Robert Doisneau used the studio to give clarity and impact to an image of French comic actor Jacques Tati looking bewildered in a sea of whiteness, as he stands surrounded by the bits of a bicycle that appears to have just exploded from under him.The success of a portrait can come from the sitter reacting to a great idea, either inspired by something found on location or pre-planned and carried out in the studio, as with Doisneau’s portrait of Tati.

Rineke Dijkstra, Hilton Head Island, S.C., USA, June 24, 1992

Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra finds plain backgrounds against which to photograph people singly, creating series of pictures of young clubbers, mums with their new-born babies and blood-spattered matadors fresh from killing. She used the sky as a backdrop in a series of pictures shot in Poland, Croatia, Ukraine, Belgium and Coney Island of adolescent girls standing awkwardly in swimsuits. The plain backgrounds intensify the strength of the pictures and magnify the straight-to-camera poses. This image (left) echoes Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and is lit with a mixture of flash and available light.

The ideal sitter

Salvador Dalí was an ideal subject for a portrait photographer. He was way ahead of his time in realizing the possibilities that photographic portraits offered to promote a sitter’s career: the more dynamic the picture, the more often it would be published and the bigger it would be used. Dalí would react positively to the wildest ideas and suggestions from photographers. Where some famous people will only give photographers a small amount of time in which to take a picture, he would happily invest hours of his time to ensure photographers got what they wanted. He was the perfect collaborator, happily leaping time and again for Philippe Halsman, peering through a magnifying glass so that Peter Beard could photograph his face strangely distorted, and standing up to his neck in the sea with flowers in his moustache for Jean Dieuzaide.

Philippe Halsman, Dalí Atomicus, 1948

Halsman suggested the idea for this picture (below) to Salvador Dalí after seeing his painting Leda Atomica in which everything appeared suspended in mid-air. Halsman suspended an easel, a stool and two Dalí paintings (including Leda Atomica itself on the right of the picture). Dalí’s wife held the chair in the left of the photo, and on the count of three Dalí leapt while Halman’s assistants chucked a bucket of water and three cats in the air. After half a day and twenty-eight attempts they had a perfect image, the product of an amazing collaboration.

Arnold Newman, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, 1968

Georgia O’Keeffe (opposite) is framed by a blank canvas and a skull, on her ranch in New Mexico. O’Keeffe used the skull as a motif in her paintings. Arnold Newman was a master of environmental portraits, his images informed by his knowledge of art and a technical ability to work with large-format cameras. He was able to communicate with his sitters as if the camera was not there.

Portraits on location

A portrait taken ‘on location’ is one in which the photographer has gone to the subject’s place of work or home, or taken him or her out into the street to do the shot. Locations offer photographers many things to work with in creating a portrait; the subject’s possessions, environment and tools of work are great props to help give insights into the sitter’s personality.

‘Found’ portraits

In many set-up pictures – such as those created in the studio – the subject is directed by the photographer and told where to look or which expression to give. This can lead to a sense of artificiality. Portraits are sometimes better when ‘found’ rather than manufactured, with the photographer melting into the background of a location and waiting for a revealing or intimate moment. Such portraits have been described as ‘candid’, a term coined by the art editor of The London Weekly Graphic in 1930 to describe Erich Salomon’s revealing pictures of politicians. (See Scoop!, p. 84.)

Mugshot portraits

Mugshots are photographs taken as a record of people who have been arrested and brought into a police station; they are taken by police officers untrained in photography. The resulting pictures show people at a time of great worry and as such make for fascinating and revealing portraits. In some famous cases involving celebrities, the actor Hugh Grant looks sheepish and terrified, the Microsoft founder Bill Gates smiles, while actress and political activist Jane Fonda looks triumphant, raising a clenched-fist salute.

Portraits with the unseen camera

Walker Evans (see www.masters-of-photography.com) believed you could gain more insightful portraits when the subject was completely unaware of being photographed. Evans took his famous subway photographs by spending hundreds of hours riding the tube, his camera peering from between the buttons of his coat and the shutter cable release hidden up his sleeve. The passengers are photographed seated and close-up. Their expressions are totally private ones – completely different from those that people offer up to the camera when they know they are in its presence.

In pursuit of similar intimacy Paul Strand fitted a 45-degree prism to his camera so that he could take pictures while people thought he was looking in the other direction. In his series Heads Philip-Lorca diCorcia photographed pedestrians in New York, Tokyo, Calcutta and Mexico City without their knowledge. DiCorcia’s camera was triggered as passers-by walked through a hidden set of flash guns. The resulting pictures show people completely absorbed in inner thought.

The celebrity portrait

The culture of celebrity power and image control has led to the phenomenon of celebrity photographers – a jetsetting elite as famous as their film- and rock-star sitters. Celebrity photographers include Mario Testino, Annie Leibovitz, David LaChapelle and anyone who has photographed Madonna. American fashion photographer Terry Richardson has taken this one stage further and has achieved a celebrity status comparable to that of many of his famous subjects, such as Lady Gaga.

The celebrity photographer is the celebrity’s accomplice, trusted for being able to flatter and keep both the star and the magazines happy by presenting the celebrity in the right light – looking edgy and sexy, not shifty, dumb or trashy. It’s understood that celebrity portraits will look fantastic hung on the walls of galleries, in the star’s mansions and in record-company boardrooms.

Being photographed by a celebrity photographer indicates high-celebrity status or the arrival of a new star. Annie Leibovitz created what she has called ‘concept’ celebrity portraits, elaborate, stage-managed photographs realized with the assistance of platoons of assistants, make-up artists, stylists and set builders. Celebrity portraits are little more than advertising images – the products for sale being the celebrities themselves.

Portraits of presidents and royalty

Presidential and royal portraits are essentially public-relations events and promotion for the state and the monarchy. Today, royal families still release official photographs at certain times such as birthdays and christenings. In a recent publicity stunt a number of hip young photographers were commissioned to photograph Queen Elizabeth II; all failed to create anything at all revealing. Most royal portraits are chocolate-box photography.

The best-ever royal portrait is surely Hiroshi Sugimoto’s picture of Queen Elizabeth II – a lifesize, pin-sharp, large-format, black-and-white picture of her waxwork, cheekily hung in the National Portrait Gallery in London among oil paintings of the royal family.

George Hurrell, Jean Harlow, 1935

With the invention of the focused spotlight, photographers working for film studios created the idols of the golden age of Hollywood. This highly artificial style produced powerful images that were more about glamour and escapism than insightful portraits. The style has been influential in fashion and beauty photography ever since and a new generation is now appreciating the technical virtuosity of the photographers who helped create the gods and goddesses of the silver screen.

Portraits of a whole town or city

Many high-street photographers work in the same premises for decades, creating wonderful and historic portraits. Philip Kwame Apagya in Ghana, Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta in Mali, Ernest Dyche in Birmingham, England, Harry Jacobs in Brixton, London, Mike Disfarmer in the small town of Heber Springs in Arkansas and Hashem El Madani in Saida, Lebanon, all created portraits of entire communities over the passing years. Madani claimed to have photographed 90 per cent of his city’s population in the course of his career. All these photographers found amazing subjects on their own doorsteps.

Their aim was simple: to make their customers look good. All offered props and a choice of plain or exotic backdrops. Apagya used amazing, brightly painted fantasy backdrops of cities and luxury apartments in his portraits.

Even the Taliban in Afghanistan, who banned all photographs except ones for use in passports, had their own secret portrait photographer. His hand-coloured pictures were discovered by chance after the fall of Kandahar.

Photographers being photographed

Photographers are often reluctant to come in front of the camera of others – often preferring self-portraits or not to be pictured at all, perhaps because they understand the power of photography. This is a pity, since portraits offer the chance of revelation, the discovery of aspects within ourselves that we may not otherwise have known to exist.

Eugene O. Goldbeck, Indoctrination Division, Training Command, Lockland Airbase, San Antonio, Texas, July 19th, 1947

Early in his career Goldbeck spotted that group photos could be very profitable, realizing that the more people there were in a picture, the greater the number of prints that would be sold. He specialized in large military groups (left).

Group portraits

Group portraits offer the challenge of trying to reveal the personalities of many individuals at once. Since this is very difficult to achieve spontaneously, photographers often engineer group portraits by carefully posing subjects to create strong compositions. This method was taken to extremes by Eugene O. Goldbeck and the partnership Mole & Thomas. They took enormous group portraits of tens of thousands of troops, Goldbeck creating pictures of regimental emblems while Mole & Thomas made a monumental portrait of President Woodrow Wilson using 21,000 soldiers.

The self-portrait

Put me in the picture

Self-portraits are likely to be self-commissions motivated by creative desire and free from commercial constraints. This often makes them elaborate and highly ambitious images. Photographic self-portraits are made with a shutter release cable or using a camera’s self-timer. Alternatively, a collaborator can press the shutter at the photographer’s instruction.

Self-portraits need not be constrained by the willingness and mood of the subject, the suitability of the location and the time and light available; they can be created exactly as the photographer wishes. This gives the self-portrait a quality not always present in other portraits.

Death, sex and race

The freedom of the self-portrait leads photographers to choose them to challenge traditions and explore monumental issues such as mortality, sexuality and race. Death is mimicked in one of the first ever photographic self-portraits, taken in 1840, in which the photographic pioneer Hippolyte Bayard poses as a drowned man – possibly as a comment on his personal devastation at being beaten by Daguerre in 1839 in the race to produce the first successful photographic process.

The work of Cindy Sherman is made up almost entirely of self-portraits examining and questioning the ways in which women are photographed. Sherman (who appropriately shares her first name with a plastic doll) dresses in costumes of the past; wearing masks and wigs and caked in make-up, she satirizes the poses of fashion photography, the pin-up and pornography. Introducing violence, horror and dark humour into her images, she sometimes pushes them to levels where they become gross and repulsive.

In her series Untitled Film Stills each picture appears to be snipped from a reel of cine film. With a great understanding of the potency of the film still, Sherman makes us imagine what might have gone before or what is to come. In Untitled No. 122 she is power-dressed in the business-suit uniform of 1980s ‘greed is good’ Wall Street culture. Lit harshly from above, with a strong shadow cast on the white wall behind her and with dishevelled hair covering her face, she clasps her fists in rage.

In another series she dresses as a clown. In Untitled No. 413 she appears against a brash background, rippled by digital manipulation to ape the vivid colours and presentation of commercial photography, transforming herself into a toxic, malevolent Ronald McDonald.

Pierre et Gilles, Self-Portrait, 1988

The French duo Pierre et Gilles, who create amazing hand-painted photographs together, were inspired by a trip to India in making this self-portrait (opposite): ‘The cinema, the temples, the sculptures, the thing of making the marvellous with nothing, with planks of wood and papiermâché! They aren’t afraid of artifice’, they enthused. They appear in studded white Elvis suits holding shiny black revolvers against a bright blue sky backdrop with cotton-wool clouds. They pose as angelic gangsters with airbrushed faces.

Like Cindy Sherman, Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura has used the pin-up for a self-portrait. Reclining naked on vivid red velvet and recreating the pose of the world’s most famous pin-up, Morimura becomes a man-Marilyn. This is a startling and unforgettable picture in which Morimura transforms both his sex and race.

Robert Mapplethorpe shows himself in a 1988 self-portrait withered and dying from AIDS. He grasps a cane topped by a small skull. It is the only one of Mapplethorpe’s photographs in which every part is not fiercely defined by sharp focus. In stark, silvery black and white, the shiny detail of the skull is chillingly juxtaposed with Mapplethorpe’s haunted face – floating out of focus, receding into the blackness.

Yasumasa Morimura, Self-Portrait (Actress), Red Marilyn, 1996

Japanese artist Morimura mirrors famous pin-up photos in his self-portraits, transforming both his own sex and race in the process.

Self-definition

Self-portraits are often used to declare the creative identity of photographers and provide the viewer with a key to understanding their work and ambition. Edward Steichen posed as a painter in a self-portrait from 1902. He shows himself holding a palette and a paintbrush heavy with oil paint, the painterly feeling and brushwork of the gum-bichromate print adding to Steichen’s self-definition as a moody master artist – Byron with a brush.

German-born photographer Helmut Newton photographed himself in a cheap hotel. Newton lies squarely on a bed covered by a partially clothed model who is embracing him, his face obscured by her hair and hands. One arm is stiffly around her, while the other depresses the cable release of the camera to take the picture of their reflection in the mirrored ceiling. The grainy black-and-white picture reveals both Newton’s voyeurism and his cold and passive detachment; he’s still dressed in a suit and has his shoes on. (See The body, p. 66.)

Self-portraits in the street

Self-portraits capitalize on the reflections or effects of the light that they’ve found by chance in the street. Nigel Henderson, Tommy Harris, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eve Arnold have all made fractured, distorted and joyous ‘hall of mirrors’ images of themselves in this way. Saul Leiter and Louis Faurer capture more sinister reflections in the windows of New York.

The American Lee Friedlander is a street photographer who appears in many of his own pictures, often as only a small element – reflected in windows and mirrors and in shadows, most famously in a shadow falling on the back and sculpted hair of a woman passer-by. (See Seeing things, p. 120.)

The photo-booth

Everyone has taken a self-portrait in a photo-booth. The coin-operated machine was originally designed to take black-and-white passport photos delivered in a couple of minutes.

Photo-booths have proved a tool for cheap experiments and have been seized upon by many photographers, artists and art students, including Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Dick Jewell. Tomoko Sawada exhibited 400 photo-booth self-portraits showing herself undergoing numerous fashion crazes, but looking straight-faced throughout.

Richard Avedon used a photo-booth to create an extraordinary self-portrait in 1964. Seated in front of the white background, he holds a cut-out photo of the writer James Baldwin with whom he was collaborating on a book. Curling the picture to half-reveal and half-obscure his face, Avedon moved towards the camera, thereby throwing the whole picture out of focus. The faces of the writer and photographer merge, creating an image reflecting their creative partnership. It is a complex and potent picture produced for a few cents.

Heroic self-portraits

These student photographs were taken in response to a brief to create self-portraits in the style of their own heroes and heroines (opposite).

Brian Griffin, Brian Griffin, self-portrait, 1988

‘This self portrait was taken at a time when it seemed like the whole world wanted part of me. In this image, I always thought I looked like a sea urchin for my human features are irrelevant because it is a photograph of a state of mind.’

Ernst Haas, The Cross, NYC, 1966

Haas was a stranger to New York when he first arrived there aged thirty. As such he was able to photograph the city through fresh eyes. Inspired by Edward Weston’s ability to take photographs that transformed the real into the unreal, Haas found a crucifix among the skyscrapers. His pictures were published in Life magazine as ‘Images of a Magic City’.

The city

Some photographers are obsessed by cities and the currents and undercurrents of urban life. They pace the pavements, watching, searching and waiting for chance meetings of sunlight and street, neon and nightlife, skyscrapers and street life. They seek extraordinary and ordinary happenings, wanting to picture the joy, intensity or malevolence of city life and to preserve scenes that might otherwise be lost forever.

Eugène Atget’s Paris

In 1898 Eugène Atget picked up a camera for the first time and began to photograph Paris. With primitive equipment and no immediate prospect of either exhibition, publication or payment, he single-mindedly embarked on a project that lasted twenty years, producing about 10,000 prints. Atget’s obsession was to photograph his vision of old Paris. Ignoring the newly constructed Eiffel Tower and the great boulevards, he focused on the narrow cobbled streets and alleyways, and areas due for demolition, photographing details such as shop fronts, signs, door knockers and streetlamps.

Robert Doisneau’s Paris

From the 1940s until the 1970s Robert Doisneau strolled the streets of Paris, finding humour and warmth in city life. In his images, lovers kiss in crowded streets, a policeman passes a door shaped like a wide open mouth which appears about to swallow him whole, and workmen struggle to shift a heavy statue of a naked female figure, their hands pushing against her breasts. His pictures are gentle and witty, showing the city to be a place of pleasure and romance.

Roger Mayne’s London

Roger Mayne photographed Southam Street in the North Kensington area of London for five years, 1956–61. He discovered the street by accident while exploring the neighbourhoods near his studio. Struck by its exuberance – family life spilling out into the streets, kids playing mass games of football and constructing swings tied to lampposts – he returned frequently to photograph the area. A gentle, quiet and shy man, Mayne blended into the background after his first few visits, taking wonderful and joyous pictures of the street as a playground and the focal point of community life.

Naoya Hatakeyama’s Tokyo

In the 1980s Naoya Hatakeyama photographed the unseen structure of Tokyo. As millions crowded through the streets above, he waded knee-deep in stinking ooze photographing the toxic canals running in concrete culverts cut just below the surface of the city. Hemmed in by the ugly backs of offices and apartment blocks, the rusty, acid water reflects glimpses of the city’s neon and fluorescent lights. Hatakeyama exerted tight control over the series of pictures, composing each image so that the bold horizontal line of the concrete lip of the canal wall runs exactly through its centre. The modern, brutal and ugly city seen in the top half of the picture is made eerily beautiful in its distorted reflection below.

Strangers to the city

Some photographers are passionate about their home town and make it their subject; others are strangers and see a city through fresh eyes. Brassaï, Weegee, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen were all outsiders who became synonymous with the cities they photographed.

Brassaï’s Paris

Brassaï was from Transylvania and created dramatic pictures of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Born Gyula Halász, he took the moniker Brassaï from the name of his home town, Brasso. Photographing only at night, he created an insomniac’s view of the city, a perspective unseen by the vast majority. Brassaï’s Paris is populated by gangsters, prostitutes, night-workers and down-and-outs. He used a Voigtländer camera and flash light from magnesium flash powder, taking his pictures on glass negatives that were so heavy he could only carry twenty with him at a time; as a consequence he had to be highly selective when picking his subjects. He also photographed the city’s graffiti – drawings, carvings, scratchings, initials and love hearts, a theme later pursued in London by Gilbert and George. Brassaï’s pictures reveal nocturnal Paris as a bittersweet place of tenderness and sex, loneliness, violence and melancholy.

Weegee’s New York

Austrian-born Arthur Fellig took the name of Weegee and created unforgettable pictures of New York in the 1940s which contributed to the world’s view of the city as a frightening place – the capital of vice and violent death. He was the archetypal grubby, hustling newshound: an ambulance-chasing, cigar-chomping news photographer, with his press badge stuck in his hat band. Chummy with both the cops and the criminals, looking for a scoop anywhere, anytime, day or night, he carried a constantly loaded camera.

Weegee was driven by the desire to be first to photograph the latest murder or fire in order to sell his images to the tabloids and wire services. He got his name after policemen and firemen became curious to discover how he got to murders and fires before them, asking him if he had a ouija board. This caught his imagination and in a play on the word he christened himself ‘Weegee’. He had a police radio in his apartment and slept in his clothes, ready for action.

Fellow newshound Louis Liotta recalled: ‘Weegee was smart. He had taken the police commissioner’s daughter’s wedding pictures, and the commissioner loved them. He took Weegee’s press card and wrote a note behind it, so when he went on a story he would show his card, turn it around and the police would take care of him, giving him access to crime scenes. They undraped the body, put the gun in the right place and he got beautiful pictures.’

Weegee also used signs on buildings, advertising billboards and cinema hoardings in his pictures with black humour. In a photo of a blazing highrise building being hosed by fire trucks, a huge billboard centre-frame reads: ‘SIMPLY ADD BOILING WATER.’

His first solo exhibition was called ‘Murder Is My Business’ and featured images of New York small-time gangsters, bobby-soxers, drunks, transvestites and thugs. Weegee died on Boxing Day, 1968, in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. The rubber stamp used on the back of his photos read: ‘CREDIT PHOTO BY WEEGEE THE FAMOUS.’ (See The tools of the press photographer, p. 84.)

Weegee, The Critic (Opening Night at the Opera), 1943

In Weegee’s most famous picture, The Critic (Opening Night at the Opera), two ageing society dames in tiaras (Mrs George Washington Kavanaugh and Lady Pell) arrive for a night at the opera, greeting the camera with smug smiles, clutching their tickets in bejewelled wrinkled hands. An unkempt passer-by – the critic of the title – scowls at them. The picture encapsulates the mutual contempt of people from opposite ends of the New York social spectrum. Weegee loved such juxtapositions.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Eddie Anderson; 21 years old; Houston, Texas; $20, 1991

The titles of diCorcia's pictures record the subject’s name, age and home town, together with the fee paid to pose. They show the sad underside of life in Tinseltown – isolation, sadness and homesickness. (See Portraits with the unseen camera, p. 36.)

Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Tinseltown

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, from Hartford, Connecticut, photographed a hidden, twilight side of city life. On Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, he approached rent boys, drifters, hustlers and addicts, asking how much it would cost for a couple of hours of their time so that he could take their picture. After striking a deal, he then photographed each person in elaborately lit set-ups in the street, in diners and cheap motels, mixing flash light with street and fluorescent light.

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Newcastle

Finnish photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen spent much of the 1970s and 1980s photographing the Byker area of Newcastle: everyday life in the streets, in family homes, in the hairdresser’s and the launderette, the bingo hall and the bowling club, finding a village in the inner city. Her pictures are tinged with great sadness; the entire area is about to be demolished for ‘regeneration’, the close-knit streets are about to be replaced by towerblocks.

Johnnie Shand Kydd: Naples

‘To photograph Naples I moved there for three months. I arrived not able to speak the language and without knowing anyone. Naples is a great city that has a sense of otherness, it has huge humour, huge exuberance but at the same time is dark and sinister.

‘To begin with you get totally seduced by the clichés of a city. This is a process you have to go through before discovering lower, more intriguing levels hidden beneath. The only way to do this is committing a lot of time to wandering the streets with a camera.’

Johnnie Shand Kydd is a self-taught photographer. In his first book, Spitfire, he photographed the explosion of Britart in London in the mid-1990s, photographing events as a participant at the centre of events. These photographs were taken in 2000 with a medium-format Mamiya twin-lens camera manufactured in the 1950s.

Fabian Monheim: Hong Kong

In 2004 Monheim chose to photograph Hong Kong using a Lomo camera. ‘When I visit a city I never visit the tourist sites. One day I go north, the next day I go south, the third day east and the fourth west, and I see what I bump into.’

The landscape

The beauty and power of nature have captivated many photographers. They have been stunned by the drama and vulnerability of the natural world – by the mountains, forests, trees, sky and sea – and have photographed the vastness of the landscape, its patterns, rhythms and rhymes, both ancient and modern, together with the fleeting effects of the elements – light, mist, wind, rain and storms.

Photographers of the landscape show us what they think of the world in their photos. Some are awestruck, some see a harmony between man and nature, others are fearful for the landscape’s future.

Landscapes and cameras

To express the scale of nature, many photographers choose to photograph landscapes with large-format cameras. The large format offers razor-sharp clarity and great intensity of detail. Although photography is very good at honing in on things – such as examining details of faces and objects – picturing huge spaces is a very different kind of challenge.

When standing in the landscape, we don’t look at details but instead experience a panorama. We use the whole of our vision, right to its edges, to experience the space. Photographers therefore began creating panoramas by joining together different photos taken from the same point. They started to build panoramic cameras that could take a broad view in a single exposure. From 1859 to 1866 French geologist and photographer Aimé Civiale made striking 360-degree panoramas that encompassed the beauty of the Alps in a single image. Hong Kong-born designer and photographer Robin Koh creates 360-degree panoramas made up of separate shots that have been perfectly merged on the computer. He mounts the images on the inside of thin, metre-wide circular drums which rotate slowly. Standing beneath, viewers can feel as if they are actually standing in the landscape.

The landscape as hero

Ansel Adams saw the landscape as paradise. The focus of his life’s work was the incredibly beautiful Yosemite National Park in California. He took his first photographs of Yosemite aged fourteen in 1916 during a family vacation and returned to the same views for the next sixty years.

Adams’ utterly distinctive pictures create beautiful order from the light falling on the mountains, canyons, trees and lakes. They show the epic grandeur and majesty of the American landscape and were immensely popular, making it possible for a public busy poisoning itself with consumer products to connect to a world of simplicity and heroic beauty. Obsessed by technical quality, Adams created the ‘Zone’ system, a method of ensuring his large-format exposures gave the viewer the largest amount of information possible about each scene.

Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942

Ansel Adams wanted to be a classical pianist, but his great skill as a photographer became his artistic calling. His understanding of light and his supreme technical ability combined to create landscape images that have become iconic views of the American wilderness. His photography and campaigning helped preserve many areas of the USA that have become national parks and are now forever protected from exploitation and development.

Andrew Watson, Figsbury Ring, 1994, and A303 and Tumuli, Salisbury Plain, 2002

Watson photographs man’s imprint on the landscape both ancient and modern.

The creative power of nature

Edward Weston was driven by the desire to make perfect pictures expressing nature’s power to create mysteriously beautiful forms. He photographed trees, rocks and sand dunes eroded, weathered and battered by the elements into beautiful shapes, photographing each subject again and again as it was altered by the light. His simply composed pictures of shells, roots, leaves and peppers look like monumental sculptures.

The precise line of the horizon bisects the exact centre of each of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s black-and-white pictures from the 1990s of the world’s oceans, taken using 10x8-inch-format Deardorff and Phillips cameras. His hypnotic pictures show the vastness of the sea and sky as stark and simple blocks of grey and black. His nighttime seascapes, taken with exposures lasting hours, are unreproducible, such is the subtlety of the contrast between the dark grey sky and the blackness of the sea. You have to view the prints themselves.

Starting in the 1940s, for the next fifty years William Garnett took photographs from the window of a small plane as he piloted himself above the earth. His pictures give an awe-inspiring new perspective on the beauty of the landscape, revealing the patterns of hills, gullies, sandbars and surf that would otherwise remain invisible to us.

‘Nature is a great artist, the greatest. I’ve seen rocks and forms that put Matisse, Picasso and Brancusi to shame. You can’t beat Mother Nature.’

Brett Weston, landscape photographer.

Man’s stamp on the landscape

Andy Watson’s photographs show the great subtlety of some of man’s imprints in the land. Taken from light aircraft, his pictures, of the Manger glacial valley in Oxfordshire, southern England, reveal a harmony between historic and modern marks on the land. In some pictures the traces of ancient settlements and enclosures blend in swirling abstract patterns with contemporary marks made by crops, tractors, trailers and combines; in others, the lines made by modern roads become absorbed into others many thousands of years old.

Richard Long (www.richardlong.org) photographs the marks that he has made on the landscape. He walks – often for many days – across tracts of uncultivated land, creating straight lines or circles. Long’s pictures engage us with the power of nature to erase manmade marks – the pictures provide the only record of the walker’s disturbance of the land since all trace of his presence will slowly be dissolved over time as wind, rain and tide reclaim natural beauty from man’s footprints. See also the work by Aaron Siskind and Minor White discussed on p. 137.

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky (www.edwardburtynsky.com)is enraged by man’s abuse of our planet. Photographing in large format and intense colour, he documents the way we have scarred the landscape with huge oil fields, refineries, tips and tyre dumps. His pictures from the 1990s of massive abandoned mines and quarries look like gaping open wounds in the earth’s skin. Burtynsky’s most harrowing photographs show bright poisonous nickel-polluted rivulets seeping into the land or trickling out into the sea.

Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings No.34, 1996

Burtynsky’s work shows how man has ruined many landscapes and contrasts with Ansel Adams’ images of an Arcadian sublime landscape. However, both are motivated to communicate through their work that we live on a beautiful planet and we should look after it; it’s the only one we have.

The still life

‘A great still life can unlock an emotional response to an object.’

Adam West, photographer.

For hundreds of years artists have made paintings of arrangements of bowls of fruit, food and drink, flowers and musical instruments. The term ‘still life’ was coined to describe these paintings of inanimate objects. Photography’s first attempts at still life mirrored these compositions. Although the French call a still life ‘nature morte’, which literally means ‘dead nature’, the photographer wants to bring the objects to life.

The object as hero

Great still-life photographs can give us a deeper understanding of and new relationships with the things that surround us. They focus in on the qualities of an object. Unlike other forms of photography, still life offers photographers a subject that can be totally controlled, particularly in the studio. Lighting, cameras, lenses and focus are chosen to help find or enhance the beauty of objects.

‘Still life is a very pure way of working. Nothing need be in a still life photograph that you don’t want.’

Sandro Sodano, photographer.

To give an object a beautiful visual value, a still-life photographer requires strong ideas and an attention to detail. Still lifes created for magazines and advertising make objects look heroic. The photographer accentuates an object’s qualities to capture it at its most luxurious, appetizing, refreshing or fashionable.

Some objects, such as plants, pebbles and shells, are naturally beautiful and have been the subject of many photographic still lifes. Man Ray, Nick Knight, Robert Mapplethorpe and André Kertész all photographed flowers, amplifying their beauty in different ways. Man Ray solarized his prints of lilies to show flowers ablaze with light. Nick Knight photographed specimens from the flower and plant collection at the Natural History Museum in London on vivid white backgrounds to accentuate their shapes. Robert Mapplethorpe photographed lilies in the studio to show their sensuality, while André Kertész photographed a melancholic tulip distorted like a Cubist painting.

Food is a frequent subject of still life. Irving Penn – a master still-life photographer – created a beautiful image of frozen vegetables straight from his freezer. His American Summer Still Life features a bottle of Coca-Cola, a stick of chewing gum, a baseball and a hot dog smeared in mustard. Perhaps Penn’s greatest still life – an image of great simplicity and humour – is of massive diamonds, worth millions of pounds, pictured as if dripping from a household tap.

Edward Weston, Pepper No. 30, 1930

Still lifes can amplify the qualities of a particular object in surprising ways, as in this extraordinary view of a pepper by the great American photographer Edward Weston.

Sandro Sodano’s still lifes of bags, 2000

Sodano makes his subjects – bags – appear heroic in these advertising still lifes. They were created in the studio by carefully controlling the lighting and exposure rather than using digital techniques.

Photographers have found beauty in the overlooked, the discarded and the ugly, sometimes coming upon readymade compositions in the street or on their travels. Edward Weston photographed a cement worker’s glove, crusty with dried cement. Chalkie Davis had a great still life presented to him on a plate – his airline meal on its tray. Irving Penn created an amazing series of photos of cigarette butts he’d picked up on the street, enlarging them to the size of posters and creating beautiful platinum prints that give each cigarette a strange sculptural elegance. The result is an identity parade of battered butts. Martin Parr even found beauty in the front seat of his car after it had been broken into, taking a still life of the gleaming tiny cubes of smashed windscreen glass sparkling like gems.

The body

The human body has fascinated many photographers. They have created images of its contours and textures, its motion, its changes through age, and its strength, frailty and beauty.

Some photographers picture the body in order to show desire, sex and sensuality, to conjure up fantasy or as a means of persuasion in advertising. Some love the spectacle of the body seen at full stretch in dance and sport, while others use the camera to help us further understand how our bodies work.

The naked body

Images of naked and semi-naked bodies surround us, dominating advertising images selling clothing, beauty products, perfume and underwear. Mainstream publications now regularly feature pictures that would once have been taboo. We live in an increasingly permissive culture, which allows more and more flesh to be seen without public comment. What were once viewed as sexually explicit images for private consumption only are now often splashed across billboards and openly perused in magazines by men and women in public.

The bodies shown in these images are more or less exclusively young, fashionably shaped and sun-bronzed. The Japanese photographer Manabu Yamanaka, however, creates far more challenging photos in his series of lifesize images showing naked old ladies, their skin deeply rippled and their bellies sagging. These are extraordinary pictures: the subjects are dignified and completely comfortable with their nakedness. They make us reflect on our obsession with youthfulness. In our world in which cosmetic surgery to tighten sagging flesh has become routine, the pictures remind us that aging is nonetheless unstoppable. Elliott Erwitt photographs the beach, a place where many of the normal social rules of behaviour are suspended. He shows the comedy of nakedness, creating witty and unexpected juxtapositions of the unclothed with clothed passers-by, of young with old bodies, and exploring the beach rituals of courtship, bathing and tanning.

Some photographers look at the beauty of the naked body. Robert Mapplethorpe photographed naked men and women posed like classical statues, studio-lit to display muscle and tone; in his work flesh becomes cold, solid stone. Edward Weston created harmony in the shapes of the naked body, his pictures lit by strong sunlight, making soft curves and throwing simple, dark pools of shadow.

Irving Penn chose fleshy and well-rounded bodies for his famous high-contrast pictures of naked women, finding beauty in obesity. The models he chose were the antithesis of the stylish and thin fashion mannequins he was photographing at the time for Vogue.

Manabu Yamanaka, Gyahtei no. 7, 1995

We are very used to seeing images of naked young bodies. But the Japanese photographer Yamanaka broke taboos in producing his series of dignified lifesize photographs of naked elderly women (above).

Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, 1982

© Copyright The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Courtesy Art + Commerce. Beautifully crafted medium and large-format black-and-white images made Mapplethorpe a famous (and, latterly, infamous) fine art photographer. Mapplethorpe directed images of the body that look like sculpture, which he then photographed. Despite the classical influences that permeated his work, as seen in this image of world champion bodybuilder Lisa Lyon (opposite), some of his more sexually charged photographs met strong disapproval from audiences. Photography of the naked body may go in and out of fashion, but photographers will continue to photograph the human form in many ways and styles.

Hong Kong-born Lewis Morley created one of the most famous pictures of a naked woman, though in it the body is almost entirely unseen. Commissioned to photograph Christine Keeler, the woman at the centre of a 1960s sex scandal in Britain involving a government minister, Morley posed her astride a backwards-turned curvaceous wooden chair, her shoulders and hair echoing its shape. The photo has been frequently restaged but without ever recapturing the potency of the original. The strength of the image comes as much from the way it conceals Keeler’s nakedness as from the way it reveals it – her torso is hidden by the chair and her arms, but tantalizingly glimpsed through the slot cut in the chair’s back, towards which all the lines in the picture converge.

Natalie Loher shows 360-degree views of the naked body in huge pictures of her friends. They stand straight as the camera scans and scrutinizes every detail. In book form, Loher’s pictures allow the viewer to turn the figure by turning the pages.

Naked abstraction and distortion

Photographers have experimented widely to create strange and sensual views of the body. Bill Brandt photographed naked models in stark black and white with a camera once used by the police. With an extreme-wide-angle lens, a fixed focus and no shutter, he created an amazing series of pictures taken in empty rooms. The lens distorts the model’s limbs into elongated, sensuous white shapes, creating images evocative of both dreams and nightmares.

Hungarian photographer André Kertész experimented with photographing the naked body distorted by mirrors from a fairground sideshow. The results are brutal and disturbing, with the bodies twisted into tortured lumps like the damned in Breugel’s paintings. Artist David Hockney created his Photo Collage Nude, 17th June 1984, of actress Theresa Russell from numerous close-up photos. The collage – influenced by Cubist paintings and the famous Marilyn Monroe pin-up – shows both Russell’s front and back simultaneously.

Man Ray photographed the naked back of the famous Parisian model and muse Alice Prin, better known as Kiki de Montparnasse. Her shape and pose echo the curves of a stringed instrument. Ray painted the F-shaped sound holes of a violin onto the print on either side of her spine, creating an unforgettable image of a living musical instrument. He called the picture Le Violon d’Ingres (Ingres’s violin) – as the naked Kiki, with her head wrapped in a cloth like a turban, looked like the subject of a painting by the nineteenth-century French artist Ingres, and as a joke since Ingres was an amateur musician. In France the phrase ‘Le Violon d’Ingres’ became slang to describe someone’s hobby.

British photographer David Hiscock converted a photo-finish camera to produce scans of his body taken over several minutes. He called the strange distorted abstract colour images ‘Transmutations’. They look like giant seismograms.

Natalie Loher, 360º Female Nude, 2004

‘This piece is a photographic observation of the human form. Individual, factual shots taken every 30º of a female nude have been pieced together to create a new, bizarre 360º viewpoint of the human body, resembling a topography or landscape.’ Loher took the pictures in a studio using a 5x4 Sinar camera. The model was positioned on a turning platform. German-born Loher trained at the Parsons School of Design in New York and at Central Saint Martins in London. Her website is www.natalieloher.com.

The pin-up

People put pictures on their walls to tell others who they are. Many put up pin-ups – reflecting their hopes, dreams and aspirations. Pin-ups are joyful images of semi-nudity that offer the false promise of sexual availability. They are stuck with drawing pins or Blu-Tac to the bedroom walls of millions of young women and men.

During World War II Hollywood studios issued millions of free celebrity pictures to boost the morale of far-from-home GIs. The pin-up of actress Betty Grable adorned more lockers than any other. Grable, famous for having her legs insured for a million dollars, now looks strangely proportioned in the picture – as though she has an over-large head. Part of the appeal of the shot may have lain in her ankle chain – tantalizingly exotic for the time.

In the 1950s the colour pin-up, shot from above, of Marilyn Monroe lounging on a sea of red satin launched Playboy magazine. The picture was used by Yasumasa Morimura as the basis of a self-portrait. (See The self-portrait, p. 41.)

Robert Doisneau, Dreams of a Tattooed Man, 1952

The pin-up offers the dream of availability, as reflected in this classic image by French photographer Doisneau (left).

69 Spencer Rowell, Man and Baby (L’Enfant), 1987

A staged pin-up image that found its way onto thousands of bedroom walls as a commercial poster (opposite). An image of its time, it captured the fantasy of many young girls of the 1980s.

In the 1970s the pin-up of Farrah Fawcett by Bruce McBroom sold a staggering twenty-million copies. A black-and-white Athena poster of a bare-chested man cradling a baby sold in the millions to teenagers in the 1980s. The latter image successfully encapsulated the dream of a perfect father and a perfect child, with the man appearing to look simultaneously both caring, vulnerable and sexy.

Pin-ups are very indicative of the tastes of their times. As such, they quickly become dated and are easily and frequently pastiched.

Pornography

Pornography shows the body purely for sexual reasons. Pornographic photos have evolved their own set of poses, expressions, locations, colours and lighting, which have been satirized and explored by photographers and artists including Dick Jewell, Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura.

In a series of photo-collages Dick Jewell looked at the gesture in which the model raises her arms behind her head, a pose used throughout the history of porn and pin-ups to indicate availability and sexual abandon. Jewell found that this raised-arms pose had been assimilated into mainstream photography and was frequently to be seen in modern fashion, pop and advertising photography.

Helmut Newton brought mild pornography down from the top shelf of the newsrack and onto the coffee tables of cosmopolitan homes. One of his pair of pictures called They Are Coming famously features four supremely self-assured naked models striding towards the viewer. In one shot they wear expensive clothes, in the other they are naked except for high heels – though one model has forgotten which foot should be on the ground. Newton saw all photographers as voyeurs, spending their days ‘looking through a little hole’.

The inner body

In 1907 William Morton used X-rays to create an amazing complete picture of the body of a young woman. Details of her necklace, the buttons on her boots and a hat pin add to the strangeness of the image. Helmut Newton echoed this use of X-rays seventy years later in advertisements for wildly expensive diamond jewellery. (See X-rays, p. 206.)

The camera has been attached to the microscope and endoscope by photographers to help doctors and scientists discover how our bodies work. In the 1960s Lennart Nilsson used revolutionary techniques to photograph a baby at different stages of growth inside its mother’s womb. The foetus appears as if floating in outer space.

The body in motion – dance

Many photographers have created pictures of dance that record great athleticism and strength or that show the body at its most graceful.

Photographers have looked at dance backstage, from the wings, in performance and in rehearsal. Art director and photographer Alexey Brodovitch created magical, experimental, grainy and blurred pictures of dancers, published in his book Ballet. Taken in the 1930s, the pictures had a huge influence on many photojournalists and fashion photographers in the following decades. Dancers swirl and rush before the camera. Brodovitch takes the viewer in among the performers on the stage.

Lois Greenfield photographs dancers at their most acrobatic. In her pictures dancers appear airborne, frozen in mid-leap. They are photographed as ‘cut-outs’ against a white backdrop, on a stage created in her studio rather than in the theatre.

The body in motion – sport

Sport features the human body in motion and at speed. The whole human experience can be encapsulated in a sporting event; the entire spectrum of emotions – from the exhilaration of winning to tears of defeat – occurs in front of the photographer. The extremes of man’s basest desires and fears are witnessed in sport and in some events – such as Olympic sprints – they are condensed into the few brief seconds of an extraordinary explosion of human energy. The body is seen stretched to its limits.

Most sports photographers look at the action, but some of the most telling pictures don’t even feature the game or event in progress. Chris Smith brilliantly caught boxer Barry McGuigan in tight close-up in his corner just before the final round of his World Championship bout. His trainer gently cradles the fighter’s head in his hands to whisper instructions in his ear, but you can tell it’s too late: McGuigan is already defeated and broken. His eyes are dead, his shoulders slumped as all the strength and energy has seeped from his body. It’s a heartbreaking picture.

Garry Winogrand photographed American football pitch-side using a wide-angle lens. In one great picture every single player on both teams is visible mid-play. Robert Davies took sports photography from the back pages into the gallery arena with his series entitled Epiphany. Davies rephotographed key moments in world sport, pausing video recordings at the exact fraction of a second at which they occurred, then enlarging the images to a huge scale, revelling in the rich coloured abstraction of the screen image. Other must-see sports photographers include Neil Leifer, Gerry Cranham and Eamonn McCabe. (See So you want to be a sports photographer?, p. 234.)

Fashion

Fashion photography allows photographers’ imaginations to run wild. Fashion photographers have creative licence to assemble extraordinary fantasies from beautiful ingredients – expensive clothes, amazing locations and models at the peak of human beauty.

Fashion photography moves forward more quickly than other facets of photography, constantly seeking originality and impact. Yesterday’s look is immediately forgotten.

‘It’s a very dynamic medium. It’s based by its definition on change. It’s about that quick chop-change – in today, out tomorrow.’

Nick Knight, interviewed in Dazed & Confused magazine.

Fashion magazines

Fashion magazines provide the venue for fashion images. Magazines compete fiercely every month to produce the most exciting and innovative pictures. The editorial fashion images often outshine their advertising pictures.

Fashion magazines use the best ‘glossy’ paper, their covers often printed with extra colours to stand out on magazine racks. Huge attention is given to ensuring the photographs are fantastically reproduced.

‘The best fashion magazines just drip in gloss. I love how fat and heavy the issues are. They promise so much. They even smell amazing thanks to all the perfume advertisements.’

Emma Wright, journalist.

The price of the magazine is the entrance fee to a world of fantasy and inspiration that most readers know is way beyond their budget and expectations. Fashion photos are seductive; they offer temptation and promote beauty, luxury and glamour.

Fashion photography is often about creating the illusion of perfection. An apparently simple photograph of a physically perfect model wearing beautiful clothes in a magnificent location is the result of hours of preparation, styling, hairdressing, make-up and lighting, followed by days of computer retouching.

‘We like to be seduced by fashion photos.’

Lee Widdows, art director and teacher.

Series of fashion pictures are called fashion ‘stories’, a name reflecting that they are make-believe rather than real. No idea or location is out of bounds in telling such stories. Stately homes, fairground rides, the pyramids of Egypt and the Taj Mahal in India have all been hired, together with the world’s most beautiful models, troupes of dwarves and herds of wild animals – and all to create amazing fashion photographs.

‘Fashion photography is about fantasy. The fashion pages in magazines are thirty pages of big pictures where the reader can be indulged.’

Stuart Selner, creative director, Marie Claire.

Great fashion stories can offer insights into life at the time the pictures were created. Through fashion photographs we can see how society has evolved, the changing worlds of work and leisure, and the obsessions and influences of different eras.

Elaine Constantine, Girls on Bikes, 1997

This is a wonderfully fresh and joyous fashion picture, created by Constantine using perfectly cast models, a great location and great props – three retro bikes. The stylist was Polly Banks.

The fashion team

Fashion photography is always collaborative. There is always a team working with the photographer, including a fashion editor, stylist, hairdresser make-up artist and models.

When a photographer creates a team of talented people that they trust there can be great camaraderie, with ideas coming from everyone behind the camera on a shoot. David LaChapelle calls his team ‘the family’.

This year’s model

Models are chosen for their ability to ‘light up’ a fashion photograph, in the same way that film stars are said to light up the cinema screen. They are totally comfortable in front of the camera and look amazing no matter how they are lit or posed.

Female and male models are employed for possessing the physical attributes of shape, colouring and height that are deemed by fashion editors and art directors to mirror public aspirations or represent the look of the near-future.

‘Models have to express the mood of the times.’

Lee Widdows, art director and teacher.

Great models can have a much broader influence on culture than just being passing clothes horses seen by the magazine-consuming public. Some, such as Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy, Cindy Crawford, Elle Macpherson and Kate Moss, have had very long careers and become universally known, their own looks and style influencing generations of women more than the clothes they are paid to wear.

Although the conventions of fashion photography dictate that clothes should only be seen on the slim, young and beautiful, occasionally photographers break these rules. Nick Knight, who has created consistently brilliant fashion photographs since the 1980s, pioneered using normal people as models, photographing stories with older models and people with disabilities.

Fashion stories also use shock for effect. When clothes are considered too extreme or revealing, or the models appear too thin, too young, too ‘druggy’ or too aggressive, the shock factor can generate huge publicity and sales for fashion magazines.

Juergen Teller, Burning Jacket, 1999

A picture from Teller’s campaign for Jigsaw Menswear – an unforgettable fashion picture, styled by Paul Frecker and art-directed by Phil Bicker.

The first fashion pictures

The first fashion pictures were of society women in their latest clothes. Readers were expected to look up to them as an example of what was fashionable. After Vogue and Vanity Fair hired full-time staff photographers in the 1920s, professional models began to be used to show off the clothes.

In the 1920s and 1930s Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene and Horst P. Horst photographed their models to look like goddesses. The latter pose in elegant flowing dresses with distant expressions on their faces, framed in dramatically lit classical sets, in images inspired by Hollywood films. In the mid-1930s Martin Munkácsi caused a sensation when he began to take pictures that were the complete opposite of these studio-crafted images of cold elitism. He photographed his models outdoors, in light summer clothes, running across beaches and dunes, expressing spontaneity and carefree joy. Fashion photography has since often veered between these two styles – between high elegance and a look of immediacy that echoes real life.

Fashion and Surrealism, vanity and vertigo

In the late 1930s Surrealism became influential in fashion photos. Photographers began to compete with each other to find the most adventurous settings in which to create unexpected and shocking juxtapositions. Erwin Blumenfeld placed models teetering on the iron girders at the top of the Eiffel Tower and Toni Frissel photographed a model drifting gently underwater in evening dress while her date – in full diving suit and helmet – looms in the dark ocean behind her. This partnership between art movements and fashion has thrived ever since.

Colour pictures regularly appeared inside fashion magazines from the 1940s. Exploiting the new possibilities of colour, Erwin Blumenfeld created inventive and graphic fashion pictures using mirrors, veils, rippled glass, projections, back lighting, solarization, multiple exposures and darkroom experiments that combined negatives and positives.

Elegance and elephants

In the late 1940s the hugely influential Irving Penn and Richard Avedon photographed the new extravagant styles that returned to female fashion after the war. Both men had incredibly long careers, undertaking a huge variety of assignments across more than half a century.

Penn created bold, pared-down, highly controlled studio images using high-contrast lighting and elegant and sophisticated models, sexily smoking. His tightly cropped pictures were revolutionary. By cutting off models’ elbows, legs and the tops of their heads, the images seem magnified and intensified on the page. Avedon chose to photograph on busy city streets and in quirky locations. His famous picture Dovima with Elephants shows a model in an evening dress gracefully stroking two huge elephants.

In the 1950s William Klein stumbled into fashion photography with little knowledge of its traditions or history, after the raw pictures of street life he had taken in New York had been spotted by Alexander Liberman, the art director at Vogue.

Klein shot fashion stories in fantastically bizarre locations – waxwork museums, graveyards, ancient ruins and halls of mirrors. His pictures are incredibly exciting and imaginative. Never repeating an idea, he tried wide-angle lenses, multi-exposures and even roughly painted out the faces of a mass of onlookers who had crowded behind a model on a shoot in the middle of Paris. He was equally inventive in the studio, building false-perspective sets, employing eccentric-looking extras, outlining dresses with streaks of coloured torchlight and photographing models against massive blown-up backdrops of neon-lit streets.

David LaChapelle, ‘Giving birth to a shoe’ story, New York, from Paris Vogue, 1995

This is a wonderfully original way to show a pair of shoes (opposite).

Nick Knight, Snakes, 2010

Nick Knight is a great innovator who uses digital photographic post-production techniques to create impossible images that look real. This shot was created for Alexander McQueen's Spring–Summer collection of 2010.

In Britain in the 1960s three spunky chancers – David Bailey, Brian Duffy and Terence Donovan – shook up the fashion establishment. Donovan photographed men’s fashions like stills from a James Bond spy movie; Duffy worked for Nova magazine, creating images of model Amanda Lear stripping that readers could then cut out to make into a do-it-yourself flick book; while Bailey was copying Irving Penn. The dynamic trio gained celebrity status and were as well known as the people they photographed, their lifestyles inspiring the film Blow-Up.

Lust, camp and colour

In the 1970s Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton created compelling and unsettling colour images of lust, fantasy and desire. They brought cruelty and imagined murder to fashion photography – their models sometimes appearing as if slain in some terrible crime. By way of contrast, Paolo Roversi and Sarah Moon created soft romantic pictures in muted and mottled colours, Roversi taking unique large-format Polaroids.

Bruce Weber takes models and clothes to great locations – country houses, film sets and pools full of inflatable animals – then takes pictures as his human subjects dress up, fool around, hang out and make out. His pictures are witty, youthful and camp. He creates images that look like those in a family album – except that everyone is paid to be there and is young and beautiful.

Weber’s playful snapshot style of fashion photography influenced the much rawer fashion snaps created by Juergen Teller, Wolfgang Tillmans and Terry Richardson. (See The snapshot, p. 157.)

David LaChapelle creates tight room sets packed with models and oversized props, and shoots in theme parks, drive-ins and at rocket launch pads. His pictures are bursting with detail, screaming colour, burning cars and naked flesh. LaChapelle’s fashion pictures are full of great ideas and humour: a baby is born to smiling doctors in a delivery suite, while mum is still wearing the very latest golden high-heeled shoes.

Fashion in the digital age

As well as being an amazing tool for retouching pictures to create perfection, digital photography gives fashion photographers a powerful new means of expression. Nick Knight melts models into abstract swirls and pools of sensual colour, while Sølve Sundsbø reduces the body and clothes to tight wire grids. In another unique approach to fashion photography, Fabian Monheim explains, ‘I had a model turn up who was really hungover and impossible to photograph, so I gave her the camera and told her to take the pictures. She really enjoyed it, and they were the best shots of the whole shoot.’

The perfect figure does not exist, but it is now possible using CGI to create models with perfect bodies, flawless skin and impossible proportions. However, fashion photography must always consider the impact that images of unattainable figures can have on its audience. On the catwalk, in contrast to the extremes of CGI makeovers, some fashion designers are demanding models with realistic and healthy bodies as a reaction against the dangerous size 0 trend that prevailed amongst the top fashion houses. Fashion by definition requires change, so maybe the next trend will be real people in a real world? But that would only be fashionable for a season, right?

Telling a story with photos

Many photographers are driven to tell stories with their pictures. News photographers, photojournalists, reportage photographers, documentary photographers and war photographers strive to find moments of visual eloquence that will make the stories they tell unforgettable. More than any other kind of photographers, they want to influence and change the world we live in by taking pictures that make a difference. Great photographers working in these areas are able to reveal the unseen and unknown, and to transport us to new worlds by creating powerful and indelible images. Some want to create photographs that ask great questions of their viewers – and are even prepared to risk their lives to do so.

Different ways of telling a story

‘Photojournalism’, as the word suggests, is the fusion of photography and journalism. The French word ‘reportage’ is also commonly used to describe this kind of work in which a photographer is present at an event to make a report in the form of a sequence of pictures.

‘Being a travelling photojournalist is utterly remarkable; the idea that you can enter people’s lives and the most extraordinary situations that are so far removed from your normal experience and share in and in some ways communicate that experience to others.’

Chris Steele-Perkins, photographer and member of Magnum.

The term ‘documentary photography’ implies that a photographic record is being created for posterity, to be viewed later in exhibitions and books; photojournalism, on the other hand, involves the creation of images for a contemporary audience that are taken by photographers commissioned by the picture desks of magazines and newspapers. News photography is a facet of photojournalism and is for immediate use in newspapers.

Different photographers have different approaches to each of these areas; some are impartial observers of events, others take sides and are crusaders with cameras.

The news photo

The job of a news photographer is to capture the essence of a whole story in a single image – a moment of truth giving the sensation of what it was like to be present. He or she has to find that fraction of a second that says it all in a stand-alone image – the storytelling moment – rarely being given the luxury of a sequence or series of pictures in which to unfold a narrative. Frequently the photographer will have no idea of the final outcome of the story, having to photograph constantly and react to unfolding events.

Despite the thousands of images available, many picture editors chose identical images for their front pages.

Front-page photographs – moments of truth

Newspaper photographers aspire to having their pictures on the front page, where their work will be seen by the greatest number of people and create the maximum impact. Such pictures are chosen by picture editors for their ability to tell the whole of the biggest news story of the day. Technical quality is not an issue here; impact is what matters. A news photo can be unfocused, grainy and even poorly composed so long as it brilliantly encapsulates an event. Content – not quality – is king.

The history of news photography

Since the beginning of photography there had always been great news pictures that, had the technology been available, would certainly have been splashed across newspaper front pages. There are incredible pictures of the ruins of Hamburg after the great fire of 1842 and of the barricades of the Paris uprising in 1848, but newspapers had to make do with publishing drawings copied from the photos.

It was not until the 1870s that printing techniques were discovered that meant newspapers could finally reproduce photographs. By rephotographing a picture through a fine screen, the image could be reduced to many tiny fine black dots, which could then be printed on newsprint paper. This was a technique known as half-tone printing and it is still used today.

The New York Daily Graphic was the first newspaper to publish a half-tone photograph in 1880. By 1900 half-tone pictures appeared in most daily papers as publishers and editors realized they could boost sales with great news pictures. Newspapers began looking for news rather than waiting for it to happen and despatched the first full-time professional news photographers around the world to places where stories might occur. Great rivalry grew between newspapers for access to original and exclusive front-page photos. The wish of every news photographer today continues to be to have his or her work partnered by the banner headline ‘EXCLUSIVE!’

The birth of the news agencies

The early 1900s saw the rise of many news-service agencies, supplying news photographs to subscribing newspapers and saving editors the expense of having to send staff photographers to cover every story. Famous agencies include Corbis, Associated Press (AP) and its great rival United Press International (UPI). Many famous photographers have worked for these agencies, including Pulitzer Prizewinners Joe Rosenthal and Nick Ut. Large news services offered a huge network of news coverage by having many of their own photographers and by buying in pictures from freelancers and regional papers, distributing the photos to their clients as speedily as possible by plane, train and boat. However, in 1906 it still took eight days for pictures of the San Francisco earthquake to make it onto the front pages of papers on America’s East Coast.

Tabloids

Tabloid newspapers developed rapidly between the world wars, featuring pictures of sensational crimes and disasters, telling their stories quickly by using large pictures and short captions. The tabloid New York Daily News launched in 1919. It called itself a picture newspaper, and had a logo of a camera with wings, indicating the speed with which its photographers could tell the news. The new tabloids’ thirst for sensation meant that news photographers were encouraged to get images by whatever means possible. For example, blurred pictures of the death of murderers in the electric chair were taken secretly with hidden cameras.

Scoop!

The photos of Dr Erich Salomon in the 1920s and 1930s were some of the first scoop pictures – sensational news photos – taken, for instance, in secret at a trial and sold for a huge fee. Salomon trained in Germany as a zoologist, engineer and lawyer before realizing that he could sell the pictures that he had secretly taken in the courtroom for the equivalent of two months’ wages. Salomon became famous by using his Ermanox camera, which was marketed with the slogan – ‘what you can see, you can photograph’. With a huge lens and a very wide aperture, it could take pictures indoors in poor lighting, but it only took one sheet of film at a time before having to be reloaded. Elegantly dressed in dinner jacket and bow tie, Salomon had the gift of being able to mix with the rich and famous without being noticed. He would gatecrash political and diplomatic gatherings, quietly placing his camera where it could view goings-on. On seeing the key moment, he would press the shutter with a long cable release, before exiting with his picture. The term ‘candid photography’ was coined to describe Salomon’s revealing pictures of world leaders caught yawning and snoozing at summit meetings.

The tools of the press photographer

The Speed Graphic camera was launched in 1912, becoming the original news photographer’s tool. Although it was heavy, it could be handheld by a leather wrist strap and was designed to use 5x4-inch sheet film loaded in darkslides. The large format was perfect for editors on a deadline, as they could publish contact prints made straight from negatives. This was Weegee’s (see p. 51) choice of camera, with which he stalked New York, photographing murders, fires and other sensations. He fitted his camera with a huge flash gun, using newly invented flash bulbs for night shooting. Weegee was the most famous news photographer in the world but was also notorious among the press pack for repositioning dead bodies in order to get a better shot.

The Speed Graphic was very cumbersome: focus often had to be guessed in the speed of the moment and the photographer had to ensure he got the shot in one, especially at fast moving events – as it took so long to load the next darkslide and change the flash bulb.

The invention of the lightweight Leica camera and its rival the Graphex in the 1920s totally revolutionized news photography and photojournalism. The Leica was invented by Oscar Barnak and was launched in 1925, and was the first camera to use sprocketed film like today’s 35mm film. Barnak worked for the cine-camera manufacturer Leitz. He had the idea of creating a camera that used cine film instead of conventional photographic roll film. It was christened the Leica, short for Leitz and camera. The Graphex also used 35mm-type film and was the first camera to have an internal mirror allowing the photographer to see the scene through the lens. These two dynamic new cameras were miniature in comparison to the Speed Graphic and revolutionized how photographers worked. For the first time they were freed from the constraints of big cameras; they could work unobtrusively and take pictures very quickly, accurately and continuously.

Wire photos

In the 1930s photographs could be transmitted down the telephone by scanning a picture and translating it into electrical impulses. Wire photos, as they were known, could be sent from one machine to another anywhere in the world; the receiving machine converted the impulses line by line back into a photographic copy of the original.

News agencies saw the great possibilities of wire photos for news stories. Pictures could be sent to many receivers simultaneously, making the distribution of images to newspapers much quicker. The first wire photo to hit the front pages – of a plane crash – was published in twenty-five cities at the same time. The wire photo became the dominant form of news-picture distribution until the 1970s. Early wire images had a very raw quality, like a photograph copied on a fax machine. This gave them the appearance of great drama and a sense of you-are-there immediacy.

The bloody news

Enrique Metinides worked for the Mexican tabloids known as the nota roja – the ‘bloody news’, whose obsessions are car, bus and plane crashes, violent death, catastrophe and suffering. Beginning in the 1940s he specialised in pictures of death and destruction, taking his first front page at the age of twelve, earning him the nickname El Niño – the kid. Using flash in daylight and later colour, Metinides became famous photographing carnage and slaughter for five decades.

A red-colour news soldier

Li Zhensheng was a news photographer for the Chinese Heilongjiang Daily. He photographed the internal war that raged across China from 1966 to 1976 known as the Cultural Revolution. This was a period in which tens of thousands of young people joined the Red Guards, driven by revolutionary zeal. Children turned against their parents and pupils denounced their teachers. Countless numbers of people were executed, imprisoned or sent to work camps, accused of being enemies of the people.

Li photographed this time of madness, the denunciations, show trials, mass demonstrations and executions, winning recognition for his work from Chairman Mao who sent him an armband inscribed ‘red-colour news soldier’ – meaning ‘revolutionary news photographer’. Li fell victim to the bitter political infighting that ensued and was himself denounced and exiled to a desolate part of rural China for two years. Despite the risk of punishment by death, he decided to hide all his negatives under the floorboards of his house. His pictures today are the only known record of the period, providing a unique and terrifying record for the world.

The Pulitzer Prize for news pictures

The Pulitzer Prize, named after the publisher Joseph Pulitzer, is a prestigious American award given every year since the 1940s for outstanding news photography. The dream of news photographers is to win this award, which has in the past gone to photographers whose pictures are among the most famous of all time. Winners include Malcolm Browne for a picture of a burning Buddhist monk in Saigon; Joe Rosenthal for his picture of American troops raising the flag in Iwo Jima; Nick Ut for his picture of children fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam; and Kevin Carter for his picture of a starving child stalked by a vulture in the Sudan. (See The World’s Best-Known Pictures, p. 148.)

9/11

Associated Press news photographer Richard Drew photographed the attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. Drew focused on the horrific sight of people leaping to their deaths from the top of the towers. One photo, now known as The Falling Man, shows a young man in a white jacket, dark trousers and black boots, framed against the steel stripes of the twin towers. Astonishingly, as he plunges head-down, he seems relaxed, casual, arms by his side, his left leg raised at the knee – offering a sliver of hope, where there was none.

On first seeing the picture on the computer screen at his agency’s offices, Drew knew that from amongst the many thousands of pictures of 9/11 this would be the one to be front-paged. ‘You learn from photo editing to look for one frame, you have to recognize it. That picture just jumped off the screen because of its verticality and symmetry. It just had that look,’ he said. The Falling Man appeared in the majority of newspapers around the world the next day. The picture ran once and once only. Newspapers were forced to defend themselves against accusations of exploiting the man’s suicide. The Falling Man has become taboo following public resistance to the fact that people had chosen to leap from the towers. There are some events to which readers wish to close their eyes.

News photography now

Today’s newspapers employ only a small number of staff photographers to cover major news stories, together with a network of nationwide regional freelancers to be called upon should a story occur in their district. The majority of news pictures printed now come from news agencies.

Photographers use the very latest equipment – cameras that can autofocus quicker than hand and eye can, with flash guns programmed to give perfect exposures, ensuring that photographers usually get the shot no matter how quickly an event occurs. Their digital pictures can be sent straight to computer screens at news desks while an event is still taking place. For the first time a photographer can tell a story in pictures quicker than a reporter can deliver copy. (See So you want to be a news photographer?, p. 233.)

Photojournalism and reportage

The news photographer is expected to communicate an event in a single picture. The photojournalist, in contrast, embarks on an assignment knowing he or she is going to tell a story through a series of pictures that will be viewed together and will cumulatively tell the story in a photo essay.

During the 1920s there was a huge public appetite for newspapers; every large city boasted many rival morning and evening papers. Publishers began to launch magazines full of large photographs, as they saw the possibility of creating popular titles that covered broader topics than the daily news. Printing techniques had improved and these picture magazines could now reproduce photos excellently.

The most dynamic titles came from Germany and included BIZ (the illustrated Berlin newspaper) and MIP (the Munich Illustrated Press), featuring work by a new breed of photographers including Alfred Eisenstaedt, André Kertész and Martin Munkácsi. They all used the new smaller, faster, lightweight cameras.

The editors of BIZ and MIP wanted to put their readers in the midst of the action. Rather than using single pictures to tell stories, they pioneered the photo essay. MIP’s editor Stefan Lorant said, ‘I didn’t think the single picture was enough.’ Ordinary people were photographed at work or play, often as ‘a day in the life’, with each story laid out over a number of pages. The magazines were designed by a new wave of brilliant graphic designers whose dynamic covers and layouts redefined how pictures could be used. With the coming together of these exciting talents, the word ‘photojournalism’ entered the language to describe this new way of telling a story.

A classic photo essay

This photo essay from a 1939 issue of the Picture Post takes a humanistic approach to telling the story of a day in the life of an unemployed man.

By the 1930s many countries had outstanding picture magazines, including Life and Look in America, Picture Post in Britain and Vu in France. All of them surveyed the whole spectrum of society and treated the commonplace aspects of daily life as worthy of attention.

Life magazine was founded in America in 1936, following the model of the German picture magazines, with the manifesto ‘To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events.’ Picture Post launched in Britain in 1938 under the direction of Stefan Lorant. It was incredibly popular at its peak in the 1940s, selling nearly one and a half million copies a week.

The period after World War II until the mid-1950s was the heyday of the picture magazines. Photographers worked freely on the street and the camera was welcomed into people’s workplaces and homes. Unlike the paparazzi of today, photojournalists treated people with respect and equality – photographing without intrusion – whether picturing the celebrity or the man in the street. Some of the twentieth century’s greatest photographers worked in this period, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Margaret Bourke-White, Bill Brandt and Bert Hardy.

Magnum, the legendary independent photo agency, was formed in 1947 to protect the integrity of photojournalists’ work. The world’s most famous collective of photographers was created with the idealistic aim, unheard of at the time, of wanting to protect the copyright ownership of their pictures and control how their work was used in newspapers and magazines. Before Magnum a photographer’s work was considered to be the property of the publication for which it was originally shot, and pictures could be cropped, retouched or captioned without a photographer’s prior knowledge or permission and reused or resold with no fee given to the photographer.

Magnum is still run as a co-operative, sharing the profits between members. Its photographers are still at the forefront of photojournalism today. They include Chris Steele-Perkins, Donovan Wylie, Steve McCurry and Nikos Economopoulos. Magnum has declared its studio to be the world.

Documentary photography

To call a photographic project ‘documentary photography’ implies that photographs are taken to create a valuable, visual record. Documentary photographs create a historical document or something that will become one. The word ‘documentary’ was coined in the 1920s to describe the new kind of films being shown in cinemas about the exploration of the world and the lives of little-known people.

Documentary photography now describes long-term photographic projects that are self-initiated: a photographer commits a number of months, years or even decades to a story, driven by his or her passion and obsession rather than a commission, and often funded by other commercial work or by grants and awards. There is the tradition that documentary photographers live with their subjects, immersing themselves in their culture and lifestyles, sharing their experiences, and that the pictures are taken with the full trust of the subjects.

‘For me documentary photography is less a matter of subject and more a matter of approach. The important thing is not what is photographed but how.’

Dorothea Lange.

Many documentary photographers stay in touch with their subjects long after their projects have been completed, returning to visit the friends they made and rephotographing the continuing story. Some photographers choose to photograph as if they were an invisible observer; others photograph as a participant in events.

Opening the eyes of the world

Shortly after the invention of photography, governments came to regard photographic records as a valuable addition to written records. Photography became routinely used in police work. Mugshots of offenders were taken to establish criminal records, full face, right and left profile becoming the standard. Soon social reformers saw the possibilities of photography as a means of educating people about poverty and exploitation, realizing that photographs offered proof of conditions hidden from the public eye.

In 1890 a book of flash-lit photographs called How the Other Half Lives focused on the appalling living conditions of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Produced by Danish-born photographer Jacob Riis, the publication of the book caused public outcry and was the catalyst for social change. Whole city blocks were torn down to be replaced by public parks and playgrounds.

Lewis Hine also believed that published photographic evidence could effect change. He photographed the wretched working conditions of the poor across the whole of America in the early 1900s, in particular child labour in factories. He was sponsored in his efforts by public and private organizations concerned with the welfare of the poor. The rubber stamp used on the back of his pictures read ‘Lewis W. Hine/Social Photographer’.

Chris Steele-Perkins, The Teds, 1976

Documentary photographers often focus on subjects that are not the stuff of headlines. Chris Steele-Perkins spent three years photographing the English Teddy Boy scene in a project later published as a book.

The term documentary photography came into common use after pictures taken by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration were first published in America in the 1930s. The FSA, a division of the US Department of Agriculture, hired a dozen photographers – including Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange – to provide a stream of potent photographs that could be distributed to newspapers nationwide, which showed the lives of the rural poor at the height of the catastrophic drought that had hit the Southern states during the economic depression of 1929. The FSA project, which lasted over five years, was conceived as ‘a pictorial documentation’. It successfully used photography to open the eyes of the American people to the plight of the people pictured.

In Britain a project known as Mass Observation took place between 1936 and 1947. It was the largest ever investigation into the culture of one country. Fifteen-hundred observers were sent all over Britain to document the minutiae of everyday life. Mass Observation looked at normal people doing the things they do each day – going to work, spending time with their families and socializing. The aim was both to reveal and preserve for a future audience the daily rituals of people who are never interviewed, written about or make the news, and to educate by contributing ‘to an increase in the general social consciousness’. The photographers working for the FSA and Mass Observation paved the way for modern documentary photography.

‘I believed that pictures should disclose the unacceptable: poverty, bad housing, hunger and that my pictures would help eventually to make the world a better place.’

Humphrey Spender, photographer for the Mass Observation project.

Giving voice to the unheard

Documentary photographers often have a mission to educate and enlighten, choosing to look at issues that are typically not the stuff of headlines but instead daily life, creating indelible images of subjects that are at the periphery of our vision. Their photos reach a wide audience through publication in books or in exhibitions.

The Brazilian Sebastião Salgado exemplifies this approach. His images give a voice to his subjects’ stories – some of which had rarely if never before been heard, opening the eyes of the world to the daily toil and struggles of his subjects. Salgado has photographed in over sixty countries, focusing mainly on people who survive from day to day, labourers, refugees and famine victims. His extraordinary series of pictures taken in 1986 of the lives of the open-pit goldminers in Para, Brazil, showed a vision of hell. Massive, muddy pits swarm with ragged workers, some of them children. Some climb huge homemade ladders, burdened with sacks of earth, others dig by hand, all under the eye of uniformed armed guards. This self-initiated assignment, carried out over a month-long period, shook viewers, who could not believe that such barbaric conditions could exist in the late twentieth century.

Bruce Davidson spent two years, 1966–68, photographing people living in Harlem’s East 100th Street in New York, having initially approached the local citizens’ committee with his idea for the project. He deliberately chose what was known as the worst block in the city and photographed in black and white with a large-format view camera. Davidson produced a wonderfully intimate series of gentle, dignified pictures of people struggling in poverty. He photographed not as a stranger with a camera, but as a trusted friend welcomed into people’s homes.

Roger Ballen (www.rogerballen.com) spent almost two decades photographing life in the small villages of rural South Africa. He revealed the unknown poor in troubling and provocative pictures which evoke the barrenness and emptiness of the South African countryside and the mindset it has helped to create in its inhabitants. His pictures are square and black and white, taken with a medium-format camera, often with vivid flash. Ballen created each picture in partnership with his subjects, viewing the small, claustrophobic square of space that he’d selected through the lens of his camera as a theatre stage on which he invited the people to perform, with their pets and children.

After taking grainy and grim pictures of his own adolescence, followed by time in jail, Larry Clark was able to talk himself into getting a grant to photograph the lives of young American teenagers. Although by then over twice their age, he photographed them as if one of their gang, saying, ‘They’re living for the moment, not thinking beyond that, and that’s what I wanted to catch. And I wanted the viewer to feel like you’re there with them.’ His disturbing snapshot pictures are shockingly ‘there with them’, exposing the reality of teen lives that are casually entwined with hard drugs, sex and guns. (See The snapshot, p. 157.)

Telling the story of war

‘Believing that one picture is worth a million words, it is the task of the still photographer to try to expose the injustices that humanity perpetrates on itself. Images of the agonies and ecstasies of war must still have the ability to shock and, one hopes, to sway public consciousness.’

Tim Page, war photographer.

Although the language of photography seems suited to fighting – with flash guns, shots, loading, aiming and capturing – there are only a few brave photographers who have a mission to tell the story of war. They choose to bear witness for us by photographing the victors and victims, looking unflinchingly at horror and death, often showing remarkable courage.

War photography has been approached as news photography, photojournalism and documentary, with each photographer striving to create pictures that force viewers to choose sides. There isn’t a no-man’s-land in war photography.

Victors and victims: Roger Fenton and Mathew Brady

The first front-line war photographer was the Englishman Roger Fenton, who was dispatched to the Crimean War in 1855, under strict instructions to bring back a positive view of the war that would calm fears at home. He seems to have done a good job. Instead of photographing the suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade, Fenton produced stately scenes of soldiers in mock-heroic poses and battleground landscapes with biblical titles which were then reproduced as wood engravings for publication. He took over 300 pictures, not one showing the rotting corpses he mentioned in his letters.

Fenton’s work was widely exhibited and inspired Mathew Brady to embark on ambitious campaigns to photograph the American Civil War, 1861–65. Brady ran a portrait studio and gallery on Broadway in New York City, across the road from Barnum’s Gallery of Freaks. Known as ‘Brady of Broadway’, he rarely took pictures himself, instead employing ‘operators’. Brady sensed pictures of death could be good for trade. When he created a corps of photographers to cover the war, the announcement of his plans made national news.

Brady seems to have spent most of his time hobnobbing with generals rather than on the battlefields where his operators were photographing. Their pictures show smashed and bloated dead bodies strewn upon fields and lying in ditches. The photos were exhibited, with no attempt made to censor their horror. The show caused a sensation amongst the New York public who fought to pay to see the pictures. Brady’s project had paid off. Reproductions of the pictures of the dead, sized for the home album, sold particularly well.

The first living-room war

The Spanish-American war of 1898 fought in Cuba became the first war to be reported with printed photos in newspapers, although these were published weeks after they had been taken, having been transported over sea and land from the front line. This war has been labelled the first living-room war as the impact of photographic images of death could reach into every home of a fighting nation for the first time.

At the outbreak of World War I press photographers were allowed to follow the British Army in France with little hindrance. The newspapers were patriotic supporters of the war and all images published were positive ones. A year into the war, as men were beginning to be conscripted to fight, morale in the country began to drop and the government saw the need to bolster confidence that the war could still be won by a war-weary nation. Photographs began to be censored and suppressed, so that only images that gave the impression that the war was being won and everyone was behind the war effort were published, despite strikes and a growing anti-war movement.

No photos of dead allies are found in British newspapers or magazines of World War I, although there are many of the enemy dead. Official photographers were discouraged from picturing their own dead troops, as were official war artists. Photographers were eventually banned from the Western front, as was any photography taken by the troops. The few snapshots that survive – taken by soldiers risking court martial – show the total devastation caused by warfare, the miserable life in the trenches and the blind terror of going ‘over the top’ to fight.

Roger Fenton, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1856 (taken in 1855)

Roger Fenton was sent to the Crimean War by the Illustrated London News magazine, with the blessing of the British War Office, complete with a horse-drawn wagon to carry his cameras, glass negatives, developing lab and two assistants. He was a strange choice to photograph the horrors of the battlefield, as he had previously worked as a landscape photographer. This battleground shot, given a heroic biblical title, carefully omits and signs of death or violence – true to the selective brief Fenton was given.

Robert Capa, D-Day landings, 1944

Many of the images from this historic shoot of the D-Day landings in 1944 were lost due to poor processing, but those that survived are a powerful visual document of a decisive event in world history seen from a human perspective.

‘The greatest war photographer in the world’: Robert Capa

The original hard-drinking, hard-living war photographer, striding through the world’s theatres of war in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s – Spain, North Africa, Sicily, Anzio, D-Day, Israel and Vietnam – Robert Capa was driven by a mission, always travelling to the front line. Expressing in his pictures the panic, anxiety and tragedy of war, he saw his camera as a weapon against totalitarianism.

Born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, he moved to Berlin and became an errand boy in a photographic agency, graduating to darkroom assistant before being given minor photographic assignments. In 1932 he sneaked into a lecture given by Trotsky; the resulting pictures were his first great success.

He relocated to Paris in 1933 and befriended André Kertész and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Finding himself short of assignments, he followed his girlfriend’s suggestion and reinvented himself with a clothes makeover and a change of name, choosing the name Robert Capa as he thought it sounded American and professional.

Capa took one of the most famous and controversial war photographs in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, aged just twenty-two. The picture is now known as Death of a Loyalist Soldier, Soldier at the Moment of Death or The Falling Soldier. A man dressed in a white uniform falls under gunfire, tossing his rifle hopelessly away, an image of the heroic stand against the fascists. The photograph was first published in France’s picture magazine Vu, then picked up by Life and Picture Post. Questions were asked about the picture’s truth and authenticity. Why was Capa in front of the soldier? Why is there no sign of a wound? Capa’s photo is thought to be of the death of Federico Borrell García on the Córdoba front on September 5, 1936, an image that is still a powerful symbol of sacrifice. Picture Post carried eleven pages of Capa’s Spanish Civil War photographs and proclaimed him ‘the greatest war photographer in the world.’

In 1938 Capa took pictures on colour slide film of the aftermath of a Japanese bombing raid. These were printed in Life magazine which, persuaded by their strength, made an exception to its policy of publishing only black-and-white photos. Capa’s photographs of the D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944 portray the panic and chaos of war more than any others. Capa, complete with a Burberry raincoat, found himself booted into the freezing water behind the American soldiers when his picture-taking from the landing craft was mistaken for a hesitation to leap. Only a third of the first wave of troops reached dry land.

After a few minutes on the beach, under heavy fire, shaking with fear and having run out of film in his two Contax cameras, Capa scrambled back onto a barge retreating to England – by which time the sea was stained red with blood, according to surviving soldiers. In haste to get the pictures printed, the darkroom assistant nearly destroyed the negatives by turning up the drier too hot, which melted the film’s emulsion; of over a hundred pictures only eight survived. The heat-blurred pictures are etched with a raw texture; they give the sensation of the intense danger, confusion, panic and fear of the aborted landings. The pictures are the inspiration for the look of many sequences in modern war films, including the first half-hour of Saving Private Ryan.

His famous advice to others, ‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,’ was the death of him, when on May 25, 1954, still in pursuit of the action, he stepped on a landmine in the Red River delta in Vietnam. Capa’s autobiography, Slightly out of Focus, is a must-read.

Haunting Hiroshima

Photographs of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were taken from the planes that had dropped the bombs as they flew home from their missions in which a quarter of a million people had died. The images of the skull-like mushroom clouds were to haunt the public’s imagination for the next decades, while all images of the victims of the bombs were censored in America for being too shocking.

The battle with censorship

W. Eugene Smith photographed American troops in the Pacific in 1944–45, concentrating on the physical and emotional experiences of front-line soldiers, photographing with sympathy and compassion, getting so close to the action that he was seriously wounded in Okinawa. His way of telling the personal stories of war is echoed in the photos of Vietnam by Larry Burrows and Don McCullin, who concentrated on taking powerful and immediate pictures of the daily lives and suffering of ordinary soldiers far from home, fighting in dreadful conditions and frequently experiencing the death of friends. Burrows’ 1966 colour picture, known as Reaching Out, shows an injured black GI instinctively turning to help his severely wounded white comrade rather than be evacuated for treatment. Burrows was killed in 1971 when the helicopter he was in was shot down over Laos. A 1968 picture by McCullin shows a shell-shocked soldier during the Tet offensive clenching the barrel of his gun, a hollow, dazed and defeated Action Man.

Vietnam was the first and last time in which the press was given the freedom to roam at will across the theatre of war. Photographers were able to travel to wherever they could hitch a ride by helicopter or truck. Their horrific pictures of the conflict swayed public opinion against the fighting and contributed to America losing the war. No government would take that chance again. During the Falklands War of 1982 the British government prevented access to the conflict by picking just two photographers to supply all the images to be published back home – one from a pro-government newspaper and one from a news agency. This level of censorship was repeated in the first Gulf War of 1990–91, though an extraordinary picture of a charred Iraqi soldier incinerated in the moment of trying to escape his tank – his head seeming to be about to crumble to ash – was taken by Kenneth Jarecke on the road to Basra. He had somehow avoided the net of press restriction to take the picture. Jarecke was shooting for TIME magazine, whose editors killed the picture, considering it too shocking. It was also censored by most newspaper editors. Jarecke reflected that ‘no one would touch my photograph.’

By the second Gulf War of 2003–04, American and British governments exerted a total stranglehold on the media by allowing access to the war only to a chosen few photographers and journalists who were ‘embedded’ with sections of the army, meaning that all their movements and activities were firmly controlled. All other members of the press were corralled at a media centre, many hundreds of miles from the front line, where the only information available was from the army’s media spokesmen.

Censorship extended to a Pentagon ban on the publication of any photos of American war dead, broken by the publication on the internet of a photo taken by a cargo handler of an American plane full of coffins draped in American flags. By far the most potent image to emerge from the invasion of Iraq is the haunting image of the terribly injured young boy Ali Ismail Abbas, whose arms had been blown off during one of the bombing raids described by the military as ‘surgical strikes’.

Telling a story in a book of pictures

All photographers want to see their work published in books. A few, including Diane Arbus, William Klein, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, have produced incredible books that continue to inspire new generations of photographers, as have Nick Knight and Richard Billingham more recently.

In turning the pages of a book of photographs you can intimately view and review the imagery, sequences and rhythms of a photographer’s work. Photographers are collectors and to possess a selection of your favourite photographer’s work in one book is a wonderful thing. Photography books both preserve the work of photographers and enable them to gain very wide audiences.

The history of photography books

William Henry Fox Talbot is credited with creating the first book of photographs – The Pencil of Nature, which was published in six parts between 1844 and 1846 using prints from his Calotype negatives. Around the same time Anna Atkins created an amazing book of cyanotype pictures of flowers. (See Where Has Photography Come From? in Loading.)

Self-published books

One of the benefits of the digital age is that publishing your own book is very easy. Adding photos, artwork and text to a story or document can be done using online publishers. Creating a self-published book is very satisfying and the process of telling a story in pictures can create a powerful body of work that can become a collectable book in its own right. A self-published book is a way of presenting your work and bringing you to the attention of those who commission photography. Online publishers such as Blurb, Lulu and Bob Books enable you to sell your book via the internet directly to your target audience or, by using print on demand, to distribute the book yourself through specialist outlets such as art shops. Collectors of photo books are always looking for exceptional new photographers and buying a first edition from a photographer whose work might become collectable is why many photography books are purchased.

With the change to online publishing, traditional paper-based book publishers and others are exploiting digital platforms and providing ephotobooks, as Apps or in downloadable formats. The future of publishing is undergoing great changes, but the traditional printed photo book is likely to remain for many years. A well-printed, beautifully designed book cannot be replaced by screen-based publication – the reader’s experience in handling it is both tactile and visual, and long may that be the case. If you have the talent, a great project and a good deal of luck, a publisher may get involved and finance a small edition. However, most photographers do not make a great financial return on book publication, but they can benefit from the kudos and the exposure that a book provides in helping to promote their career.

The patched American flag: Robert Frank

Robert Frank’s book The Americans is pivotal in the history of photography. It is a benchmark for the huge impact a story told in a book of pictures can have. Each image in the sequence of only eighty-three black-and-white pictures, beautifully printed in a small black bound book, stands alone opposite a blank white page. The pictures were selected from over 28,000 Frank took during a meandering journey across the breadth of America in a battered Ford in 1955 and 1956. The photos express alienation, sadness and bewilderment, a sequence stitched together with images of the stars and stripes of the American flag, appearing sometimes threadbare and patched, often sliced by the framing of the pictures. Gas stations, jukeboxes, drive-ins, coffins and crucifixes also feature in the layers of imagery that journey through the book. You feel as if you are travelling with Frank, looking from his car window.

Upon its publication in 1958 The Americans caused outrage. Critics called it warped, sick, neurotic and joyless, offended by the audacity of the title, regarding it as an attack on American values and way of life. Frank had perfectly captured a nation on the cusp between the dying optimism of the early 1950s and the radical changes to come in the 1960s.

The Americans is still in print today and Frank’s pictures have influenced every succeeding generation of photographers. The Americans is photography’s version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a sad Beat poem for a changing country. Kerouac even wrote the introduction.

Loneliness, strangeness and sadness: Diane Arbus

‘Giving a camera to Diane is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.’

Norman Mailer, American novelist.

Diane Arbus’s groundbreaking book was first published by Aperture in 1972. The pictures are unforgettable silvery, black-and-white squares with smudgy edges that tell intense and compelling stories of loneliness, strangeness and sadness. Each picture is displayed on the right-hand page, accompanied by a simple and strange title on the left. In some pictures we see people in ordinary surroundings, refusing to live ordinary lives. Tattooed men, transvestites, strongmen, circus performers, men in drag and a lady nursing a baby monkey that is dressed as a child are all examined by the harsh cruelty of the exploding raw flash bulb. In other pictures passers-by, stopped in the street, on the beach or in the park, look straight at the camera, posed symmetrically in centre-frame, seeming drained by life. Of all the pictures in the book, the final few photographs of the disabled, wearing masks and playing games, are the most uncomfortable to view and impossible to forget. Taken in 1970–71, they are now known as The Untitled Series. The book, which is still in print, has sold over a quarter of a million copies.

A tabloid gone berserk: William Klein

William Klein created four legendary self-designed books, New York: Life Is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels (1956), Rome (1960), Tokyo (1964) and Moscow (1964). The New York book had a very bold design and was hugely influential. Klein wrote: ‘I saw the book as a monster big city “Daily Bugle”, with its scandals and scoops, that you’d find blowing in the streets at three in the morning… I saw the book I wanted to do as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, grainy, over-inked, with a brutal layout, bull-horn headlines.’ Klein’s pictures are full of energy, distortion and blur. Printed in stark black and white with no midtones, the images rush at the viewer like TV pictures fast-forwarded with the contrast turned up full. (See Elegance and elephants, p. 78.)

Fighting and making up: Richard Billingham

Richard Billingham’s book Ray’s a Laugh (1994) contains no text except for half a dozen lines on the back cover and a few words from Robert Frank. The photographs detail in raw, full-bleed colour the daily life of Billingham’s mum, alcoholic dad and brother in their claustrophobic flat overrun with pets. The Billinghams’ life consists of drinking home brew, fighting and making up, smoking, feeding the cats and doing jigsaw puzzles. The book puts you in the centre of the family’s chaos – the dad’s staggering drunkenness, the haze of hangovers and nicotine – with glimpses of affection and happiness. You can smell the stench of the flat.

Sequence

Some photographers are not satisfied with creating single images and choose instead to express their vision in sequences of pictures. Sequences can intensify a view and greatly develop ideas, creating a greater impact than individual pictures.

Early sequences

In the 1850s cameras were designed with a series of lenses so that a photographer could take a number of portraits – either four, eight or twelve – on the same photographic plate. These were the cameras that sparked the carte-de-visite craze. They greatly reduced the expense of having your portrait taken, which led to a huge increase in the popularity both of a trip to the photographer’s and of collecting photos. Contact prints were made from the plates which were then cut up for presentation. The uncut pictures create a jerky, stop-start record of photo sessions, showing the sitters as they slightly alter their poses and expressions. These series look very similar to Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of movement made thirty years later, the difference being that Muybridge precisely controlled the time between the taking of each picture.

Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion, 1878

In 1872 a wealthy railroad tycoon with a large stable of racehorses hired Muybridge to settle a bet – reputedly for an astonishing $25,000 – between himself and a trainer as to whether there is ever a moment when all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground at the same time. Muybridge set up a series of cameras side by side at a racetrack so that he could photograph a horse galloping across their path. To each camera’s shutter he attached a taut thread which would be broken as the horse passed, causing each shutter to snap in sequence. A horse called Occident sped past, tripping the shutters and settling the bet. Muybridge’s pictures provided incontrovertible evidence that all four legs were off the ground at one point.

The weird world of Eadweard Muybridge

Muybridge lived an extraordinary life. Following a severe bang on the head in a stage-coach crash, he changed his name and career. From being Edward Muggeridge, unsuccessful book dealer, he became Eadweard Muybridge, brilliant and very innovative photographer.

As well as creating nearly 800 famous sequences showing the movement of horses, zoo animals and people, he developed the camera shutter and invented a projector that could show his sequences in motion – a forerunner of the cinema. Muybridge also found time to hunt down and murder his wife’s lover – a crime of which he was acquitted in a sensational trial.

Etienne-Jules Marey

Like Muybridge, the French photographer Etienne-Jules Marey was obsessed with photographing movement. After seeing Muybridge’s pictures of horses running, Marey became determined to photograph the movement of birds in flight. He invented a photographic gun with a rifle sight and a clockwork mechanism which, when the shutter was fired, made a rapid sequence of twelve exposures. Marey called his pictures ‘chrono-photography’, which means time-photography.

The power of sequence

The power of the repetitive image is known to every fruitseller who has ever created displays of boxes of oranges or apples, and to every supermarket manager who employs shelf-stackers to pile tins of peas or beans. Repeated images stimulate the eye. Andy Warhol saw these commercial displays and adopted their methods to produce silkscreened paintings of soup cans and Brillo boxes.

Peter Beard uses sequences to amplify the experience of being present at an event. His serial pictures of a matador killing a bull and of a charging lion offer the viewer a much more intense experience than any one of the pictures could on its own.

The humour of sequence

Elliott Erwitt creates humorous sequences of pictures, often with unexpected endings. He makes observations and tells great jokes in pictures – like a flick book or a photo cartoon strip. Robert Doisneau created a joyous sequence of pictures – taken with a hidden camera – of different people as they stopped to look at a nude painting on display in a gallery window. The expressions of the people vary from outrage to envy and pleasure.

Staged sequences

Duane Michals stages sequences of photographs using friends and models, room sets, double exposures and props. His sequences create a dream-like poetic world in which strange and puzzling things happen; characters disappear into bright light, spirits leave the body and flowers grow on people as though in a time-lapse movie.

Harold Edgerton experimented in a studio with rapid bursts of flash light to photograph sequences of fast-moving action, including tennis players serving and golfers striking the ball.

Collections

Some photographers use collections of similar images for impact. Photographers love collecting images, both with their cameras and by finding photos. Sequences occur or are built, gaining potency and connections by repetition.

Duane Michals, I Build a Pyramid, 1978

Self-taught photographer Michals stages scenes to create sequences of up to twenty pictures exploring big themes such as mortality and desire (opposite).

Elliott Erwitt, Not That Naïve, New York City, 1990

Erwitt is a photographer who can tell great jokes with photographs, in this case using a sequence shot in Central Park. ‘Erwitt has the wonderful ability to anticipate scenes that most photographers wouldn’t even notice’, says picture editor Tony McGrath. Erwitt has created many pictures of dogs, published in his books Son of a Bitch and To the Dogs. If you like Elliott Erwitt’s photography, see also the work of William Wegman.

For forty years the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher have meticulously and systematically photographed industrial architecture. They shoot water towers, cooling towers, blast furnaces and gas tanks. The Bechers precisely compose and carefully correct the perspective of each image using their large-format camera. All the vertical lines run parallel in the pictures, creating a flat-on, deliberately bland view. Grouping the photographs in categories, they display them in tight grids of images, reinforcing the buildings’ strange brutal beauty and symmetry. Artist Idris Khan reinterprets the Bechers’ pictures by superimposing entire sequences to make a single image, which Khan enlarges to a massive scale.

The artist Dick Jewell collects and reworks sequences of photos from newspapers and magazines. He created a massive mural from every photo he could find of the famous Olympic race between Zola Budd and Mary Decker in 1984. Jewell’s picture offers a view of the famous incident in which the racers collided that was impossible for any single spectator present at the actual event to see. It shows the key moment from all angles of the arena by combining pictures taken by different photographers all around the track, together with others he found published that had been taken by people in the crowd. Jewell completed the picture by adding his own photos taken from TV footage of the race.

The slide-show sequence

Magic-lantern shows predate photography and were a very popular form of entertainment. Comic stories, adventures, stories from the Bible and morality tales were told through sequences of projected hand-painted or printed slides. Some projectors could show up to three images at once through different lenses and were used to create startling effects.

The invention of photography introduced glass photographic slides and soon the photographic slide-show entered many Victorian front rooms, where the first of many generations of young children were to be bored senseless by family photos of faraway places.

Dick Jewell, The Olympic Incident, 1985

Artist Dick Jewell uses a huge sequence of images to amplify an event. Feeling the world’s media had unjustly accused the runner Zola Budd of tripping Mary Decker, he used every picture available to analyze and clarify what had actually happened. Jewell studied at the Royal College of Art in London. Publications of his work include the books Found Photos and Hysteric Glamour.

Sequences of projected images are used by many photographers and artists today. The projector offers the photographer an inexpensive way to display photographs at a large scale and in high quality when used in a darkened room. Nan Goldin first showed her photographic work as projections in nightclubs in the 1980s.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s life in pictures

Jacques-Henri Lartigue recorded his life in a sequence of wonderful pictures. He created 130 large photo albums, packing their 14,500 bulging pages with beautiful pictures. Each page is carefully composed, with notes of time, place and participants. The albums are all of similar size and Lartigue stored them on specially made shelves. Today the photos are exhibited chronologically in their albums – a sequence of tens of thousands of pictures.

Lartigue is photography’s child genius. Before being given a camera as a seven-year-old in 1901, he imagined you took pictures by simply blinking quickly three times! Although his first camera was taller and heavier than he was, he was able to take pictures that still appear fresh, joyful and spontaneous today. His father was among the richest men in France, and young Lartigue grew up surrounded by servants who became the willing subjects of many early pictures, along with his older brothers Zissou and Maurice.

Lartigue’s family loved the excitement of motor-car races and joined the crowds that flocked to see early attempts at manned flight. Lartigue photographed these events with the camera he nicknamed an ‘angeltrap’, experimenting with ways of photographing the speed and energy that he witnessed. These pictures of the movement of cars and planes look like dynamic Futurist paintings.

As a teenager Lartigue became fascinated by the stylish Parisian women he saw strolling around him in the latest dresses and hats, and began to photograph them with a passion. These images – and in particular one of a woman wearing black-and-white stripes – became the inspiration for Cecil Beaton’s designs for the film My Fair Lady.

As he grew older Lartigue simply continued to photograph constantly – his loves, travels, family and everyone he met, living a life of pleasure, untroubled by the changing world or the need to work. In 1963, following a chance encounter with John Szarkowski, director of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he was offered an exhibition there. As a consequence Lartigue went overnight from being totally unknown to becoming an internationally famous photographer. The Peter Pan of photography – the boy who refused to grow up – became a professional photographer at the age of seventy and continued to create enchanting photographs full of youthful glee and wonder until his death in 1986.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Bichonnade Leaping, 1905

Taken at the tender age of ten, this shot encapsulates the playful, lively spirit of Lartigue’s work. Lartigue enjoyed a charmed life and the joy of living is evident in his photographs, shot over many decades.

Persuasion

Advertising campaigns and political campaigns

Some photographers are passionate about advertising, seeing it as the peak of professional photography. They are thrilled by the idea that their work may be seen at massive scale by huge audiences.

Advertising photographers love the collaborative aspect of putting together a campaign. There are many other creative people involved in advertising shoots – art directors, copywriters, stylists and set builders – and their partnership brings ideas to life. The job of the advertising photographer is to stir the appetites of the viewer by creating images that not only show a product but give it added value and resonance through the way it is presented.

Propaganda has the same purpose as advertising – to change the public outlook. Advertising is used for commerce, propaganda for politics. Propaganda spreads a message and propagates ideas – aiming to plant thoughts and images in the viewer’s mind that assist or damage a political or social cause.

Creating desires

Advertising and propaganda images have a tremendous directness, simplicity and purity. Nothing appears in them by accident. They work through the same methods – claiming attention and creating desires through viewers’ identification with the people featured, their feelings towards the well-known person photographed or the image’s humour or shock value. Successfully creating these images of persuasion is a fascinating creative challenge.

Impact

‘You have to visually arrest people. It’s your job to stop them in their tracks. You have to shout louder than the cacophony of visual noise in the street.’

Francis Glibbery, art director.

Advertising and propaganda images have to give a message to a viewer who isn’t looking for it. These messages have to stand out on hoardings and billboards from the visual chaos of the street. Images have to arouse the viewer’s curiosity as well as demand and reward a second glance.

People buy magazines for the editorial content, not the ads, so the advertising images must be more visually striking than the editorial material that surrounds them or they will be ignored.

Nick Georghiou, Maasai, Landrover Freelander advertisement, 2003

As the product – the car – is absent, the picture calls upon the viewer to unwrap the message – a brilliant idea, brilliantly executed. Georghiou, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, works exclusively in advertising. He has created images for numerous campaigns for global brands including Adidas, Sony and Vodaphone. More of his work can be seen at www.nickgeorghiou.com. This ad was dreamt up by writer Mike Boles and art director Jerry Hollens.

‘You don’t want to see ads. You don’t buy magazines for the ads – an ad by definition is a waste of your time. A great ad sneaks up on you when you haven’t asked it to. By the time you’ve engaged with it, it has left you with a warm feeling. It steals your brain.’

Clive Challis, art director and teacher.

To command our attention, bold vivid colour, huge scale, dynamic design and the impact of ‘cut-outs’ – in which a figure or object is seen ‘cut out’ against a bright white background – are all used. Cut-outs are used to pare down the visual to its essence.

Ideas, ideas, ideas

Images of persuasion are carefully designed to speak directly to viewers. They are generally partnered by a few words in support of the picture. The viewer is challenged to decode the idea the picture and words create. For advertisements to be successful, ideas have to be fresh, new products have to be seen as instantly desirable and established products have to be seen in a new light. This is an exciting challenge. Advertising photographers are given the essence of an idea and asked to make it work – by creating photographs that are both visually wonderful and that deliver the idea with maximum impact.

‘You have to crop everything down to concentrate the viewer’s mind. The more extraneous stuff there is, the more you lose sight of the idea.’

Clive Challis, art director and teacher.

No advertising idea is considered too extreme or unrealizable. Photographers often have the luxury of a large budget – huge sets can be constructed, lavish locations hired, teams of models and extras cast, elaborate props built, outfits designed and the latest expensive technology harnessed – all to help make an idea come to life.

Advertisers have always striven to be in the forefront of modernity and technology, commissioning the most innovative and creative photographers to produce their campaigns from early greats like László Moholy-Nagy and Irving Penn in the 1930s and 1940s, through Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand in the 1950s and 1960s, to Nick Knight and David LaChapelle today.

Propaganda photojournalism

Many world leaders have employed photographers or used photography as a way of controlling their public image. Presidents, prime ministers and royalty allow carefully vetted photographers access to them so that the public can be supplied with a highly controlled peek into the inner sanctum of power. The pictures are choreographed by public-relations managers to ensure those photographed always appear in a positive light.

Hou Bo worked for the Communist Party in China, taking propaganda pictures of Chairman Mao. Her pictures were widely distributed by the Chinese authorities, who used them to spread the message of the people’s love for their leader and his heroic deeds and of the great progress of the revolution. When Mao was reported to be dying, her pictures of the seventythree-year-old happily splashing about in the Yangtse River were used to quash the rumour. In 1959 Hou Bo photographed Mao surrounded by adoring young pupils on the steps of Shaoshan school. Millions of posters of the retouched and hand-coloured image were distributed throughout the whole of China. When Hou Bo was later accused of taking unflattering pictures of Mao, she was imprisoned in a labour camp.

Shock and subversion

Oliviero Toscani’s advertisements for the clothing company Benetton in the 1980s featured a cast of multiracial models in brightly coloured jumpers under the slogan ‘All the world’s colours’. The campaign was developed by juxtaposing warring nations united in harmonious woollen clothes: an English model with an Argentine, an Iranian with an Iraqi, and an Arab with an Israeli.

With each successive campaign Toscani decreased the visibility of the products being promoted, before discarding them entirely. Keeping the same ‘cut-out’ photographic style, he increased the shock value of the images. Soon priests kissed nuns, a black woman breastfed a white baby and a newborn child cried while covered in blood. Each new campaign was eagerly anticipated, though as soon as the shock value waned Toscani was replaced and the company refocused itself on ‘cash for cashmere’.

The Canadian-based Adbusters Media Foundation (www.adbusters.org)creates subverts instead of adverts and uncommercials instead of commercials. It uses billboards, magazines, TV and the internet to try to pick apart advertising campaigns and prick the balloon of consumerism. Employing the same visual and copywriting language as the multinational corporations it so loathes, Adbusters uses the power of great ideas and photography as a weapon against consumer culture and mass merchandising.

The artist Barbara Kruger uses the intense punch delivered by advertising photography in conjunction with brutally direct copy. Her larger-than-billboard-sized images are overpowering and demonstrate a total mastery of the art of persuasion. Kruger uses very tightly cropped, stark black-and-white photos and dynamic design so that words leap out at the viewer together with the bright, blood-red colour associated with McDonald’s, KFC and Coca-Cola. Her startling images address us accusingly: ‘Your life is a perpetual insomnia’; ’Who is bought and sold?’; ‘How dare you not be me?’ You feel as if the words are being rammed down your throat.

Manipulation

To manipulate literally means ‘to use the hand’. Some photographers ignite our imaginations by creatively manipulating photographs in collages and photomontages. Manipulation allows the impossible to happen; objects of hugely different scales can interact, fantasies can be visualized and the totally unexpected and ridiculous can be made to occur.

Tetsuya Tamano, Untitled, 2000

While on a residency at Fabrica – the Benetton-sponsored communication research and development centre in northern Italy – Tetsuya Tamano was asked to create images that reflected his view of contemporary society. This is one of the series created using digital technology. He went on to become the art director of Colors magazine.

In the process of manipulation photographs are cut up and used as raw material. They can be juxtaposed, rearranged, added to, cannibalized and ‘sampled’ in the same way that contemporary musicians now sample music.

‘Life is a cut-up; as soon as you walk down the street your consciousness is being cut by random factors. The cut-up is closer to the facts.’

William Burrows, writer.

Prior to digital photography, pictures were manipulated using scalpels, scissors, glue, paint and airbrushes. Today many photographers use the computer programme Photoshop instead of the more traditional physical tools. Photoshop has reawakened the art of manipulation.

Collage – recycling images

‘Collage is the greatest idea of the 20th century.’

Damien Hirst, artist.

Many photographers and artists keep everything visually interesting that they see in newspapers, magazines and in the street. Collage is a brilliant way of recycling these materials to make new images.

The word ‘collage’ comes from the French verb coller, which means ‘to stick’. Collages are composites of photographs, paper, fabric and other found images stuck together, sometimes combined with painting. Pablo Picasso first used collage in 1912 in a painting called Still Life with Chair Caning, in which he glued a piece of wallpaper printed with bamboo cane onto his painting.

‘I think collage comes somewhere between photography and film. As soon as you put two images together they begin to tell a story. When you put multiple images together the story gets really exciting.’

Fabian Monheim, photographer.

Different photographers and artists have used collage in different ways and created collages from different materials. Max Ernst cut up catalogues and magazines in the 1920s to create images that the art critic Robert Hughes has described as ‘edgy visual poetry distilled from everyday things’. The artist Brion Gysin chanced on a wonderful collage technique after creating accidental juxtapositions when he sliced through several layers of newspaper while cutting a picture mount. Vik Muniz (www.vikmuniz.net) creates collaged faces of movie stars, singers and friends made from confetti-sized bits of coloured paper torn from magazines; the eye blends them together to make photographic portraits. Peter Beard combines his photographs with found animal bones and skulls, drawings and jottings and pictures torn from tabloids. See also work by Peter Blake, Jake Tilson, Kurt Schwitters, Richard Hamilton, Robert Motherwell and Nigel Henderson. Joseph Cornell’s treasure boxes are amazing little theatres of memory, and David Hockney’s photo collages are named ‘joiners’. (See The camera in the hands of artists, p. 134, and What makes a great photographer?, p. 146.)

John Heartfield, The Spirit of Geneva, 1932

An example of John Heartfield's biting political commentary, created using effective photomontage. Here the dove of peace is shown impaled on a bayonet, in protest against the shooting of demonstrating workers in Geneva, the home of the League of Nations and symbol of peace amidst growing facism in Europe.

Photomontage

Photomontage is the name given to the technique of combining photos in such a way as to produce images unseen in reality. Pictures made in this way can possess an extraordinarily immediate visual impact and illustrate ideas very clearly and powerfully through unusual, perhaps absurd or satirical juxtapositions and the use of humour. As a result, photomontage has frequently been used in social and political campaigns. Photomontages use original photographs, pictures found in newspapers and magazines or advertisements. Hannah Höch, El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Max Ernst, Erwin Blumenfeld, Linder Sterling, Cat Picton Phillipps and John Heartfield have all produced must-see photomontage.

The origins of photomontage

When photos of faces, actions and products are removed from their intended backgrounds, they take on a new power. When these cut-outs are combined in new ways, they can create fresh images with quite different meanings.

This way of working was developed in the 1910s as photographers, designers and poster-makers searched for new ways of creating instant impact with their work. Designers during the Russian Revolution of 1917 used the technique to produce potent propaganda posters. They enlarged pictures of the heads of politicians to massive size and juxtaposed them with crowd scenes in dynamic perspectives to convey the message that their leaders were powerful and heroic, and that the people were utterly united behind them.

Around the same time, artists of the Dada movement began creating anarchic montages for their exhibition posters and for the covers of their manifestos and magazines. They chose images of modernity such as pictures of planes, record players and machine parts, which they then frequently joined to photos of their own heads. The Dadaists wanted a new name for this work to distinguish it from the Cubist artists’ use of collage. They chose the word ‘montage’, which means ‘fitting’ or ‘assembly line’ in German.

The leading Dada artist working with photos was John Heartfield (originally Helmut Herzfeld), who was nicknamed ‘monteur’, meaning ‘mechanic‘or ‘engineer’.

Photomontage as a weapon

Where many Dada artists used montage to create works of art, Heartfield later used it to create highly eloquent anti-Nazi propaganda images, which were published in German newspapers in the 1930s, often as their front pages. A slogan at the entrance to a show of his work proclaimed ‘Use Photography as a Weapon’.

Dick Jewell, A Change of Face, 1977

Artist Dick Jewell created this photocollage from pictures found in books, newspapers and magazines. ‘It was prompted by finding many instances of photographs that had been taken to accompany an existing or prior photo.’ Jewell printed the collage as a photo-lithograph and flyposted copies around central London. His work frequently features found imagery. ‘Photomontage allows you to pick the aspect of a photograph you really want to maximize. You cut it down to purely that bit you’re interested in and chop out the distractions. When you then join that piece with other pure bits, it then really starts to have power.’ Dick Jewell, artist.

Carefully choosing famous quotations from leading politicians, Heartfield undermined their intended messages by creating skilful, witty visual juxtapositions using press and specially commissioned photos. When Hitler boasted ‘millions stand behind me’, showed a bloated plutocrat passing a backhander into the Nazi leader’s saluting hand, thereby showing Hitler to be nothing more than a puppet, bankrolled by industrialists’ millions. Heartfield was eventually forced to flee from Germany to escape Nazi persecution for his campaigning.

Peter Kennard created startling images for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1980s, including a photomontage of a massive nuclear missile being sliced by the sharpened edge of the CND logo. On his website Kennard explains that he wanted to ‘break down the image of the all-powerful missile, in order to represent the power of the millions of people who are actually trying to break them’. Kennard’s montage has been used with great impact at all sorts of scales – on billboards, posters, placards and even on tiny badges.

Manipulation in the digital age

Where once viewers could see immediately that a photomontage or collage was the result of manipulation, today it is impossible to tell whether an image has been radically altered in Photoshop. Computers allow images to be combined seamlessly. Although Photoshop can be a very exciting creative tool, it has brought about some developments with worrying implications for the medium of photography.

In 2004 a photograph was issued to the press that appeared to show presidential candidate John Kerry sharing the stage with actress Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally in the 1970s. The picture was publishing dynamite. Coming to light in the middle of the campaign for the White House and at the height of the debate about the US presence in Iraq, it was immediately put on the front page by many national newspapers, potentially swinging public opinion against Kerry. It turned out, however, that the picture was a fake, carefully ‘photoshopped’ from two separate images and created as part of a smear campaign against the Democratic politician.

Fashion pictures in particular endeavour to hide manipulation. A mouth or eye from one picture can be added to the face from another. Bodies can be exchanged and smoothed by specialist retouchers known in the fashion industry as ‘the skin guys’ – without us being any the wiser.

Instead of meaning ‘to use the hand’, manipulation now means ‘to use sleight of hand’. The manipulation is not just of images, but of us, the viewers, too. (See In the digital age, p. 140, and Trusting photographs, p. 154.)