Great Photographers of the 20th Century
Part 1: Toward a Canon of the Artless Art
Photography is still less than 200 years old. Painting and sculpture, dance and storytelling have been around forever, but this particular medium — the first to combine artistic vision and modern technology — has existed for just the blink of an eye, historically speaking.
All other genres of art, until modern times, were created entirely with the human brain, voice, hands and body. Photography was the first whose creation remains, in some sense, mechanical. Created through chemistry rather than dexterity, it was greeted with a range of reactions, from delight, to curiosity, to skepticism and scorn.
From the first of Fox Talbott’s images in the 1840s, photography evolved quickly to span the full thematic range of the other visual arts. Most of present-day categories originated in the 19th century. Portraits certainly, landscapes, documentaries, and “fine art” imagery.
But photography truly exploded in the 20th century. Technical advances changed it fundamentally, as film became smaller in size and more sensitive to light, enabling instantaneous pictures. Cameras became small and mobile. They reached the hands of the everyday family, recording the comings and goings of domestic life.
They recorded the daily movements of politics and all the trends of fashion and culture. They went to war with dynamic capabilities Matthew Brady’s motionless cameras never had. Photography took in everything, everywhere, all at once. The blast of information and emotion that we take for granted today was revolutionary 100 years ago.
For some years I’ve been wondering about creating a canon of the great photographers of the 20th century. Within all the innovation and activity the last century, where were the true peaks of achievement? Who were the greatest practitioners, and is it even fair to ask that question? Can we legitimately pick artistic winners and heroes?
Defining a Canon of Photography
A canon is essentially a list of the greats. The word comes from the Greek for “standard” or “measure.” The first canon was the selection of books to be included in the New Testament. A canon later became the list of books taught in a university curriculum — the essential heritage of a culture that an educated person should know, given that no one could read everything.
The idea that there even can be a canon of any subject is conservative and elitist. Paper was expensive in ancient times, so the Greeks literally had to decide which plays should be copied and preserved, and which not. They deliberately let some fade away. Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes survive. Others did not. Who chose? The Greek canon was a social consensus about that culture’s greatest works and greatest artists.
In 1994, Yale professor Harold Bloom published The Western Canon, The Books and School of the Ages, a personal attempt to name the greatest figures of Western literature — that is, European and American literature. At the time, academia was in the throes of moral and philosophical reevaluations. African American studies, women’s studies and the beginning of LGBTQ studies were overturning assumed orthodoxies. The hegemony of dead white men as lords of the universities was over. Undaunted, and somewhat belligerently, Bloom proposed a list of 26 dead white (mostly) men to represent the finest and highest of the literary arts.
Bloom’s book is useful as a starting point in defining a canon of photography, mainly because he was careful to set rules. He had three. I want to suggest a fourth.
Bloom’s first rule was that his canon was about aesthetics only. Only the greatest artists — poets, playwrights and authors — could be included, based on inherent aesthetic quality alone. All other considerations — moral aspirations, gender inclusiveness, racial diversity, social sensitivities — could not count.
His second rule, not particularly emphasized, was prominence. There are no unknown writers in Bloom’s canon. To be included, a writer had to be known and critically appreciated. All members of his canon had to have historic influence. If you were unknown but more eloquent than Shakespeare, good for you. But you didn’t make the cut.
His third rule was what he called strangeness. “With most of these twenty-six writers, I have tried to confront greatness directly: to ask what makes the author and the works canonical. The answer, more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.”
This is an interesting concept. Bloom was looking for something new. Canonical writers had to offer something never seen before. In some cases, their newness is now so familiar from our backward-looking point in history that we are unaware that it once seemed strange. In other cases, the rough edges of the artist’s originality have never completely worn off. They still seem “different.”
In photography, an example of assimilated newness is Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment — the magic that happens when composition and meaning merge in an instant of time to become a great image. This is now a standard of photojournalism so accepted as to be a cliché. Contrast that to Diane Arbus’s awkward and off-putting portraits, or Man Ray’s stiltedly “modern” Rayographs. Bloom might conclude that Arbus’s and Ray’s strangeness have never been fully assimilated. But all three of these artists can be, and to my mind are, canonical.
These are Bloom’s three rules of a canon, but for photography I include a fourth. The artist’s exploration of photography itself.
Because photography was the first genre that merged artistic consciousness with modern (”high,” at least at the time) technology, “Is photography an art?” vexed criticism for most of the 20th century. To be included in the canon of photography, I feel that the artist should also address this fundamental conundrum: what is photography?
There is, of course, the craft itself. Paul Strand is certainly an early example of a passionate craftsman, as was his protégé, Ansel Adams. They elevated the production of negatives and prints to new levels.
But an exploration of photography itself go beyond the existing craft. The line between art and something else very quickly transitions into issues of inclusiveness that Bloom considered off limits. Example: Jacob Riis’sHow the Other Half Lives — the groundbreaking 19th century use of photography to explore and report on social injustices. Or Robert Mapplethorpe’s unprecedented coverage of gay life. Or Robert Capa’s war photography. Photography as reportage is central to the 20th century.
Finally, there is expanding the technology of photography itself, not just the craft of existing technology. There are fewer examples here of photographers who explored the technology while also producing influential art. Man Ray is one. Jerry Uelsman is another.
So my four rules boil down to this:
1. Aesthetics is primary. Selected photographers must be visually of the greatest excellence in their own right, even if their work is documentary or experimental.
2. Historical influence. No “sleepers.” This poses a problem in a medium where amateurism has always been prominent. What about Lartigue, Atget, and eventually Vivian Maier? I include Lartigue and Atget in my canon because they were discovered and become influential within the 20th century. Maier was only known in the 21st century. The goal here is to include photographers who can serve as the tentpoles — the tallest points over which the whole history of the art can be stretched.
3. What they do is new in some sense. At first view, their work seems strange compared with what has gone before. They break new ground or are at the forefront of a movement.
4. They advance photography itself. Either in craft, in genre (including moral influence), or in technology.
Two Themes of 20th Century Photography
Bloom divided literary history into “Ages”: Aristocratic, Democratic and Chaotic. These spanned almost 700 years, from Dante, completing The Divine Comedy in 1321, to the death of Samuel Becket in 1989.
Because 20th century photography was so dynamic within a single century, I divide my canon into two themes, not ages: the Artists and the Reporters. They overlap chronologically, and the titles are admittedly very general. The Artists continue the early exploration of photography as an art of its own. The Reporters launching the intense 20th century use of photographs as the primary visual reporting medium, losing that primacy to TV only in the last decades of the century.
This canon is meant to provoke discussion, but many if not most of the entries should be obvious. Bloom put Shakespeare and Dante at the center, and who could argue with that? Photography has its counterparts. So here goes: a conservative, elitist list proposed by an unqualified amateur critic who feels over his head in making the attempt. The reward, I hope, will be in the commentary from readers.
Continued Next Week, August 17, in:
Great Photographers of the 20th Century : Part 2, the Artists
