Century [antikvár]

Preface Look. We Have Come Through This sequence of photographs is an attempt to outline the history of the twentieth century as the camera (with a great variety of photographers attached) has seen It. It has by no means taken note of everything and its vision, particularly as a means of recording news events, has generally been of a Western orientation. Nevertheless it has observed a great deal of the world-wide human predicament over this period - the first century to have been examined from beginning to end by this long-sought instrument of useful and pleasurable, although also often harrowing, record. Those who have not seen much of the times at first hand, will, I hope, be really interested to see so many pictures, mainly of hard history, printed so well and shown together in such a quantity Those of us who have come through a significant part of the century unscathed might accept this book as a welcome souvenir on leaving a territory which they have partly explored, but will never be able to visit again, and which will always seem to contain all the larger human problems set out in the clearest possible form. It has in some ways been the most thoughtless, but in other ways the most thoughtful, hundred years in human history - in which all kinds of moulds were broken and dies cast, but offering nothing to provide us with any firm grounds for either bright hope or black despair. The generally refined art of nineteenth-century photography suffered a shock when mechanical replication of its pictures became widespread at the beginning of this century Although the halftone screen and block had been available in the late 1870s, the coarseness of its images must have seemed risible to the professional photographer, and none too impressive to the general public. Most illustrated magazines continued to make engravings from photographs rather than use the new half-tone process. When this process became more refined and was in general use in popular magazines and newspapers, the quality press and magazines still disdained It - they could see no way of using a gift that seemed to lose as much In quality as it offered In the prospect of gaining its images a wider currency. So artist-photographers, wedded to the magical results obtainable from the use of large-plate cameras and albumen or other beautiful methods of printing, took refuge in even more refined processes and the cultivation of an ever more painterly sensibility Those with more mundane interests waited and worked Impatiently to see how they could take advantage of the improved technology and new commercial opportunities. Their hopes were gradually realized as the development of mass-circulation magazines, together with the cheap roll of film and camera, created the new discipline of photojournalism. At the turn of the century, the makers of stereocards would have been at least mentally prepared for this new development, as they had been most concerned with providing solid information. This can be seen in the two stereocards from 1899 that are reproduced here (pp, 18-19). But people had grown tired of stereo-viewing evenings by the family hearth, and this must have left a few competent picture-makers out of work and ready to join the media of the new age. However, there was inevitably a short period to begin with which was deficient in narrative images, and for the collection we found ourselves faced, before 1914. with fewer photographs of historic events and more of such whimsical subjects as elephants' tea parties and Sarah Bernhardt's travels. Several photographers seemed to have grasped the idea of photojournalism early on. The wonderful picture of the Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid from L'Illustration shows that the French were well aware of its future, as were the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. From Britain Horace Nicholls scented the right direction very early in the photographs he took of the Boer War. two of which are reproduced here. Later two Daily Mirror photographers, the Grant Brothers, came up with the excellent shots of the Young Turks in 1909 and the evacuation of the British from Antwerp in 1914. The powerful and atmospheric picture of the Japanese battle-cruiser Hatsuse in 1900 was not photojournalism. The photograph was made for the Vlckers archives and was taken on a laige-plate camera by a company photographer, who mostly took pictures of naval gun barrels and the firm's other products in Newcastle. This photograph has survived because the firm's management allowed only a hundred of many thousand glass negatives to be preserved in the late 1960s. We must always remember, while forgetting it as soon as possible, how many images have been lost or destroyed by accident, lack of appreciation (often by no means always justified) or destruction during wars. The principle behind the selection of photographs for this book has been simply to look at everything i-elevant to the main narrative (and things that aren't) that I and my highly perceptive assistant could lay our hands on (or that I could find in my memory) and just discard what seemed irremediably dead or boring - while sneaking in ft