Photography [antikvár]

Introduction There are difficulties involved in writing a survey-history of photography. There is, it is true, a generally agreed photographic canon, which includes the work of Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Walker Evans in the United States, August Sander in Germany, Eugene Atget in France and Bill Brandt in Britain. But no one could claim with any confidence that we know all of the major photographers who have ever worked, or that we ever will. Whole careers have been cancelled out, disposed of when photo-agencies, archives and newspapers have rationalized or moved house. Sometimes such bodies of work are relocated and assessed, but whole swathes of the photographic past have been lost for ever. Collectors and historians of photography have also discriminated against certain kinds of practice. Architectural photography, for instance, has only recently begun to shoulder its way into a position of respectability. In 1978 the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn exhibited pictures from the twenties and thirties by Werner Mantz, only one of many distinguished architectural photographers from that era. Photo-journalists have also been consistently overlooked, especially if they worked for local newspapers or for the mass-circulation press. Few of them had the time or inclination to tend their reputations as artists. They also worked constantly against the pressure of deadlines and, as a result, their negatives vanished into archives from which, in some cases, they never emerged again. Among their number are some outstanding artists: James Jarché, for instance, one of Britain's most resourceful picture-makers during the 1930s. Other difficulties arise. There is the question of photography's basic unit of account, which historians and commentators have commonly understood to be the individual photograph - as though photographic history was the history of painting writ small. Yet not all photographers thought of their work in this way. They took pictures to go alongside texts, or to be set in sequences and groups, where the arranging was done by a picture-editor. Thus 'the photographic work' can as easily be a book or photo-essay as an individual picture. One of the supreme achievements in the medium is Walker Evans's book American Photographs (1938)- Separately Evans's pictures are handsome and interesting; together, in the order chosen for them