History of Photography

As anyone who is the least bit familiar with the history of photography might expect, theories of photography as art have had to answer the old question, How is photography an art at all? From the first time that question was asked (which was virtually at the same moment photography became known to the public), the possible answers were thought to lie in an examination of the relationship of photographs to the world they represent.

John Szarkowski, most active in the sixties and seventies and the leading formalist theorist, accepted the subjectivists' view of photographs as expressive images existing independently of the world they represent. But for Szarkowski, the independence of the photograph was even more important than it was for the subjectivists and more important than issues of expression. In Szarkowski's view, the history of photography is an internal affair that proceeds according to laws of formal evolution. Photographers are essential to this history because they are the agents by which it moves. But they are also incidental to this history because photography itself, not the photographers, is its content. In his radically formalist engagement with the photographic medium to the exclusion of all else, Szarkowski was a voice for the social status quo of the sixties and seventies. By not admitting social considerations into his theory, he implicitly accepted the status quo.

Responding in part to George Kubler's idea that the evolution of form may be studied in all areas of material culture and not just art, Szarkowski reasoned that if the history of photography lies in the discovery of the medium's innate characteristics, then a proper historian will recognize those discoveries in any kind of photograph no matter who has made it or in what context. Furthermore, he thought, the vernacular practitioner was actually better equipped to discover the reality of photography than the artist-photographer.

The most photographers were Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams. These photographers were themselves theorists of considerable importance. Their critics were a varied group, who generally did not accumulate a significant body of criticism and whose writing gains interest only as it revolves around the work and ideas of these artists.

Newhall's disagreement with Adams in no way dampened his enthusiasm for straight photography. He once characterized his ground-breaking exhibition of 1937 at the Museum of Modern Art as a crusade for pure photography, prompted by his admiration for the work of Stieglitz, Adams, and Weston. The catalogue for this exhibition-later editions of which became The History of Photography-is a historical survey, but it can also be read as a justification of contemporary straight photography.

Hattersley was not thinking of reading in the same ahistorical, apolitical sense that White and Ward were. He was pointing out that photography operates in the social sphere, and we must learn to read it to protect ourselves from manipulation. It would be a mistake to portray Hattersley as a socially motivated critic-he later wrote a book called Discover Your Self through Photography in which he equated the practice of photography with religion-but here he recognized that photography has great power outside the artistic tradition, not as a truthful witness to society, as in photojournalism, but as an apparatus of social control. In this respect he hinted at the kind of analysis and history of photography to be written later by such scholars as Victor Burgin, who has analyzed the complex, culturally determined codes of connotation in advertising photographs.