Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents Photography as Factor in Social Development Elizabeth McCausland April 1947
In this development, photography played its part, at the same time benefiting by the incessant forward drive for technology. Every step in the technical evolution of the photographic medium was organically related to the unflooding of material means for the use of land resources, raw materials, power and other productive factors. Probably only in a country born on the synthesis of physico-chemical science into an expressive visual tool - have had the rapid and dynamic rise to ascendancy which it had here. The outward evidence of this is to be found today in the consummate technical perfection of American photography. The most immediate use of photography immediately after the Civil War. was on the frontier. Before Fort Sumter, the government had utilized the technical services of photographers on various surveys. After the final cementing of the bond of union, the government geological purveys began to include photographers among their technicians. The recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of photographs of the Civil War and the frontier offered a wealth of proof of the beauty as well as documentary content of this work. Finally it was the photographs made in Yellowstone in 1871 by the now venerable W. B. Jackson which persuaded Congress to set up the first national park in 1872. Testimony is interesting; for one historian wrote that "the photographs were of immense value. Descriptions might exaggerate, but the camera told the truth." In this implicit visual honesty lies one of the chief emotional appeals of the medium. The rapidly unfolding years of the end of the 19th century saw most of the technological evolution of photography. The invention of flexible film gave the medium its mass base in a simple, portable instrument; for without roll film small folding hand cameras could not have been developed to the same degree of perfection and convenience. Speed of lenses and emulsions use already increasing; improvements of recent years are quantitative rather than qualitative, though the general use of panchromatic film did not come until after the fires World War and was accelerated by the mass art, the movie. What happened, technically speaking, in this time, was that photography became a second language, the people's language, in fact. Today there are an estimated 25,000,000 Americans who own and use cameras. Even reducing this figure to the half million which Eastman Kodak estimates to be the number of serious skilled amateurs in the United States, this is an audience of a size and a character which painters do not possess; for the numbers of amateur and Sunday painters are not conceivably as great. Having no barriers comparable to those of verbal language, photography is a universal means of communication. Furthermore, it has added another dimension to communication, that of time, especially with radio-photos. The meet immediate and human instance of this is V-mail, a remarkable and admirable application-of the record value of film. The forwarding of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony score to this country on microfilm had the same historical and cultural significance. In the war effort, the use of aerial photographs for the making of maps (for military reconnaissance and intelligence) in the relatively new technic of photogrammetry is another example of the immediacy or instantaneity of photography--duet as are the speedlite and the stroboscope. In other words, for a hundred years photography has been integrated in the life of the American people. It has played its part for technical as well as esthetic ends. Yet, as said in the previous article, from the beginning it has always been accepted by men of culture and we may add, having reached a later time, women of culture--as an expressive entity in its own right. To Southworth and Hawes, D.O. Hill, and Brady, we may add in the latter part of the 19th century the portraitists Nadar and Mrs. Cameron and the pictorialists (the word is used in a positive sense) Atget and Stieglitz, all of whom added to the communicative and esthetic powers of photography. Thus for a century photography has had a continuous history of production and at least from 1851, a continuous record of exhibition and critical comment. A notable source of information on this point is the publication "Camera Work'" founded in 1,903 by Stieglitz and his Photo Secession. Other files to consult are the "American Photographers" and "Camera Notes." From the histories of Newhall and Taft before mentioned ("Photography: A Short Critical History" and "Photography and the American scene"), plus these sources, one may get a good idea of the consensus the latter part of the century. Indeed, the rejection of photography as an "art" is of comparatively late date. To be cure, photography was abut out of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; but so, also, was the fine painter Eakins, because he used a nude male model. In 1,903 there was an argument as to whether photography should be included in the Fine Arts building at the St. Louis exposition. At Chicago, in 1893, photographic prints had been relegated to the Liberal Arts building similar treatment had been accorded photography at the Paris Universal exposition of 1900; and the Pan-American exposition at Buffalo in 1904, had shown no photographs as pictures. To offset the trend toward discrimination the Photo Secession was set up in 1902; and the Pictorial Photographers had formed an organization the previous year. "Camera Work" itself was founded in 1903, as a channel for ideas and their discussion, and continued till 1917, the World War putting an end to many cultural activities. However, there was both a public and, more important, a market for photography as art, even though officials did not always accord it recognition as art. Joint exhibitions were held annually, in rotation' in hew York, Philadelphia and Boston, from 1884 to 1894. A little later, "Camera Work" the Photo-Secession and Stieglitz's "291" would provide more channels for photography. At the London Salon in 1905 American photographers had prints priced from $5 to $500; and the next year, gross sales amounted to almost $3000, at an average price per print of $45. Today the market for graphic work made by the traditional black-and-white methods of etching, woodcut and lithography is no higher, if as high. All these facts indicate that photography was undergoing the process of coming of age, as all new ideas, technics or political parties have to do. The first appeal which photography makes--not its only appeal, but first in point of time--is, as said before, its honesty. Indeed, this characteristic is often distorted, unscrupulous users of photographic pictures depending on people's implicit trues in what they see projected in the photograph to perpetrate fakes and hoaxes, sometimes of grave social import. In 1910 "Camera Work" quoted the English playwright, George Bernard Shaw, on the point, as follows: True, the camera will not build a monumental fiction as Michael-Angelo did, or coil it cunningly in the clearest purity or the softest mystery as no draftsman can or ever could... Photography is so truthful--its subjects such obvious realities and not idle fancies--that dignity is imposed on it as effectively as it is on a church congregation. Earlier Shaw had written in the "Amateur Photographer" in 1902 that for portraiture the camera can give many variations, the painter but one. He went on to say that "the painter sees nothing in the sitter but his opinion of him: the camera has no opinions: it has only a lens and retina.... The camera has an eye without a hand.... The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical; his technic is incurable artificial." Because the camera is independent of this hand-drawing and this technic, a photograph is much less hampered by mechanical considerations, he reasoned, continuing that the camera "is so utterly unmechanical that it cannot arrange its lines, being, indeed, unable to draw a line at all. In representation, however, this unmechanicalness becomes a power instead of a liability." He ended that "the fact is that photography is being taken up by painters and draftsmen; and they are importing into the darkroom the imperfections and corruptions of the methods which have come down to us from the stone age." Another "character witness" for photography, quoted in "Camera Work" in 1906, was the Belgian writer, Maurice Maeterlinck. He stressed, by implication, the social responsibility of a medium to its audience, writing: "Art has held itself aloof from the great movement, which for half a century his engrossed all forms of human activity in profitably exploiting the natural forces which fill heaven and earth. Instead of calling to his aid the enormous forces ever ready to serve the wants of the world, as an assistance in those mechanical end unnecessarily fatiguing portions of his labor, the artist has remained true to processes which are prim, traditional, narrow, small, egotistical and overscrupulous. A little later the American critic Charles B. Caffin wrote in "Camera Work," No. 17, as follows: What, however, if we happen to be much alive, and to know and to be impressed with the fact that the whole trend of modern science been toward a better understanding of living, and the direction of modern art to try to body forth the forms and ideals and emotions of actual present life? So we come up to the present, in a rapid telescope view of photography's century of life. The question of the explanation of the continuing rivalry between photography and painting, with which Part I ended end which was to have been considered in this, must go over to Part III.
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