I purchased this book when it first appeared and have long felt gratitude to the editor and the publisher (Könemann) for this substantial and expensive undertaking. My own interest in photography has grown out of the need to document South African buildings and heritage places. So often old photographs are our only reference point for how things looked in the past. Photographs provide another dimension for understanding past places, people and events. Today, we take the quick cell phone snapshot as a ready to hand tool to catch all our moments. I literally have thousands of photos in my gallery. I sometimes wonder how many of these will last as well as the old, faded sepia toned images from the past.
Photographic collections from the past such as the Bensusan collection in Museum Africa or the T D Ravenscroft and Ferdinand Gros photographs are brilliant windows into the past. I have always been on the lookout for the photographs of early postcard makers. I then met Carol Hartdjizer who through his research and collecting deepened my own interest in past photographs and photography. Today, the photograph has become a work of art, and we praise the photographs of David Goldblatt for his use of the camera to peer into the soul of people and our collective. Roger Ballen is another photographer who has turned South African photography into an art form. Carol has educated me to the nuances and objectives of photographer and the captured gelatine subject. A recent particular delight was his talk on the Johannesburg photographic studio of Sara Busijke - Sara. But before I wax lyrical about South African photographers lets zoom into the book in hand.
This is one of those compendiums of photographic books that in its day, the 1990s, was one of the authoritative histories of photography from the European perspective and done with a Gallic orientation. It is a very French book published on the initiative of the Arts Council of the Centre National du Livre in Paris. The editor, Michel Frizot is emeritus director of research at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. After all it was the Frenchman L J M Daguerre who made the first photograph in 1839 and hence the invention of a daguerreotype. We all owe the French a huge debt of gratitude.
But it is a book that cuts across cultures, even though Africa hardly features. Coming in at 768 pages it is a weighty tome that absorbs and delights with its breadth of historical subject matter and the wide range of themes. There are 41 essays by 29 contributors with Frizot contributing almost half of the chapters. This editor has made this his book. The approach is thematic rather than a chronological book with the result that the book moves backwards and forwards across many topics and approaches. There are themes of pictorialism, stereoscopy, portraiture, the photographic studio, light and aura, travel photography, fashion photography, advertising and war photography to mention just a few. There is a mix of chapters on the technology of the photograph and the camera and the product the camera allows to be created. Photography blends the genius of invention and the genius of creation.
A New History of Photography Book Cover
The most fascinating aspect of the book is the many photographs almost all of them in sepia tones. There must be more than 1000 images, so this is a book to dip into over many happy evenings – it is not bedside reading and it’s not a book to be read from cover to cover. It is a book that must be savoured and that each time one tackles an essay, a new point of view or interpretation will be encountered. It is a rich source of the photographic image. There are views of people in diverse places – at home and at work, at play, posed and natural. There are many images of the photograph as both an object of beauty and capturing a beautiful scene in nature. Some of the photographs are grotesque, disturbing and freakish. There are photographs taken by explorers, travellers and tourists. There is a chapter on the photographer’s studio.
The photograph has evolved because the technology of the camera advanced as an invention and from that point it was about adaptation and the invention of the better, quicker camera with speedier exposure times. War brought a call for photojournalists and some remarkable images came out of the American civil war. Photographs captured history such as the American civil war, the revolutionary moments of 1848 or the barricades in Paris in 1871. By the time of the Crimean war, the graphic drawing gave way to the more accurate and realistic photographic image. People in Europe began to learn about China because there was someone there with a camera capturing the moment when a specific fort fell. There is a quick introduction to the erotic in Japanese photography.
I was disappointed that South Africa does not feature but then our world is beyond the ken or interests of the editor. Of course I am reminded that our own South African War at the turn of the 20th century had many dramatic moments caught on camera. Battles, human suffering, pompous generals, the cameraderie of the Boer commando. This means that that war has remained in memory because we have the photographs. But the African experience is missed in this book so don’t even expect to find anything on the African continent.
Nevertheless, the thematic reach is wide – there are chapters on portraiture of the famous and the anonymous, the illustrated press, the portrayal of fashion and fantasy in photography juxtaposed against suffering and hope. There is a chapter on photography as fine art introducing the aspirations and work of Julia Margaret Cameron. Advertising and the demand for book illustrations pushed photography to new heights in the early 20th century. How and why did certain scenes present themselves as photographic? We talk about a Kodak moment but why? So often photographs define memories.
The best feature of this book is its reach across photographic subject matter and in posing the questions around life, experience, existence and art. If you are interested in why we want to capture the image of lives and the sequence of fleeting moment or what we choose to put into a photograph this is the book that will inspire and make us think about memory, philosophy, the personal and the impersonal. Today, we take the smartphone photo facility so much for granted but this is a book to reflect on which of one’s own photos are durable and may have meaning in future generations. Perhaps the most important question asked by Alfred Stieglitz in 1922 was can the photograph have the significance of art? Photography has not replaced art but has become both an art form and a simple record of human and personal endeavour.
This is a book that takes its place as a quirky and rich reference book in my photographic book collection.
Kathy Munro is an Honorary Visiting Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. She enjoyed a long career as an academic and in management at Wits University. She trained as an economic historian. She is an enthusiastic book person and has built her own eclectic book collection over 40 years. She researches. writes and lectures on historical architecture and heritage matters. She is the Chairperson of the Heritage Association of South Africa (2021-2025). She is the Vice Chair of the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation and served as chair 2019-2020 and has served on the Board of Management of this body for over a decade.