Photography Society Gisele Freund

Photography & Society "

BY GISELE FREUND

,Jo13ooy pho­ tographers and clients because ofits unimpressive size, but the smaller camera made it easier to be inoonspiwous and thus shoot difficult news stories.

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cision instruments of all sorts. 120 Born in 1879, he had

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been interested in photography as a youth. He loved to

take long walks carrying his 7 X 9-inch camera, the dou­ ble wooden film holders, and a tripod. Not baving a

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strong constitution, Barnack dreamed of a camera that could be camed in one's pocket, an idea that obsessed

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him throughout the years he worked in the optical indus­ try. Finally in 1 9 1 I, he became the director of the Leitz

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scopes and telescopes were manufactured, and at last had

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the opportuniry to realize his dream. He built a small camera using 35mm film, half the size of the photo­

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factory research laboratories at Wetzlar, where micro­

graphic negatives then in use, and capable of multiple exposures. Years of research were still necessary before the Leitz Company could manufacture the new camera.

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In 1925, the Leica was finally introduced at the Leip­

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zig Indusrtial Fair where it was an immediate success. Equipped with a I:3.5'50mm lens, the Leica was already being sold in 1930 with several interchangeable lenses that gready increased its versatiliry. The film allowed 128 Photography & Society

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thirty-six exposures without reloading. The Leica revolu­ tionized the work of the professional photographer. Accustomed to working with single plates, most illus­ trated press editors did not at first allow reporters to use the Leica. The flash technique had been improved in re­ cent years and large cameras yielded good large contact prints. Even a magazine like

Life, founded in

1936, ini­

tially disapproved of the use of the Leica. Thomas Mc­ Avoy, a member of the first team of Life photographers, recounted the difficulties in having the new camera ac­ cepted: 'I had brought a Leica back from a European trip. The editor-in-chief, thinking it a toy not to be taken seriously because of its small size, forbade me to use it. At an official reception in Washington, I defied him and took a whole series of photographs in front of my be­ wildered colleagues with their large cameras and flashes. Comparing my prints with theirs, the management ad­ mitted that my photogtaphs were much more atmospher­ ic and lively because, without the flash, 1 had caught the guests unaware. From then on, the Leica was appreci­

ated; and all the photographers followed my example.' 121 1 had a similar experience with my own first official

assigument. In 1936, Julien Cain, then director of the

Bibliotheque Nationale, asked me to photogtaph all of the libraries in Paris for the 1937 World's Fair. When 1 arrived at the Nationale, the librarian saw my small Leica and exclaimed: 'You can't be serious. Come back with a real professional camera.' He threw me out, but

1 had an idea. 1 went to the flea market and bought an old 8 x lo-inch wooden camera for about 50 francs (ten

dollars). This time the librarian was satisfied and the camera was positioned on a cumbersome tripod. My head buried in a black scarf, 1 pretended to adjust the setting, although the camera did not have any plates. When 1

was left alone, 1 quietly took a whole series of photo­ graphs of the old bookworms bent over their books with

my Leica. As 1 did not use the flash, 1 worked unnoticed.

The Birth of Photojournalism in Germany

I2.9

My first victim was a distinguished old man with a long white mustache, asleep and snoring peacefully; a monk in his robe hunched over his work was my second, fol­ lowed by others. The literary pavilion at the World's Fair used many of my photographs, and the story on the Bib­ liotheque Nationale appeared in the 463rd issue of Vu magazine on 2.7 January 1937, entitled: 'An important photostory by Vu at the Bibliotheque Nationale, the world's leading intellectual factory.' Production figures show how rapidly the Leica took over the market. In 1 9 2.7, the company put out 1 ,000 cameras; 10,000 in 1928; 50,000 in 193 I and 100,000 in 1933. Today its production has reached more than a million. Constantly improved, the Leica has made the Leitz company famous all over the world. As a result, the camera is copied almost everywhere. Since the Second World War, Japanese companies in particular have be· come lively competitors of the Leica. Founded in Wetzlar in 1848, the German Leitz com­ pany is a family business now in its fourth generation. Leitz produces more than 6,000 high precision instru· ments made up of 70,000 different parts. Technicians are highly specialized and well paid. In 1972. the com­ pany realized that manufacturing the Leica body, which alone involved more than 700 parts, was no longer profitable, since its retail price was no higher than the manufacturing costs. The Leitz company became asso­ ciated with the Japanese company Minolta, and Leica bodies are now made inexpensively in Japan because of the low wages and mechanized production. Leitz has also worked out an agreement with Advanced Metals Re­ search Corporation in Bedford, Massachusetts; and it has signed a contract with the Swiss company Wild/Heer­ burgg for the manufacture of electron microscopes. 122 In 1974 the owners of the Leitz company were forced to dispose of 5 I percent of their stock, thus losing control of the business to the Swiss finn of Schmidheini, which in 1 3 0 Photography & Society

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tum is part of a powerful trust. Today family businesses,

however large, are often doomed to failure unless they become part of mnltinational enterprises. The new democratic spirit embodied in the German illustrated press reached a brutal end with Hitler's rise to power. Germany had hardly begun its recovery when the Depression began in the United States. The New York stock market crash on Black Friday in October 1929 seriously affected the large American capital investments in Germany. Unemployment in Germany during the following years increased so dramatically that in 1932 near­ ly six million people were out of work. Their poverty was one of the decisive factors in Hitler's rise to power. As a result of pressing economic problems, political life became so radically polarized that all parties, particularly the Nazis and the Communists, included paramilitary organizations. Chancellor Bruning governed by emer­ gency decrees alone, and virtually ruled without the pow­ erless Parliament. On 30 January 1933, Hindenburg, president of the Reich, asked Hitler, who had just become chancellor, to form a new government. In Berlin, the S.A. staged their famous public burning of books by the best­ known writers, and Germany was plunged into a period of 'night and fog.' Thousands of members of the artistic and intellectual elite went into exile. Those unable to save themselves in time were arrested and sent to concentra­

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tion camps. The press was muzzled. Anyone suspected of doubting the ideas of the Third Reich was dismissed, along with those who could not prove that they were of pure Aryan blood. The editors of major magazines were all replaced.

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Kurt Korff fled to Austria and later to America. Stefan Lorant was imprisoned. He was released a few months later, but only after he could prove his Hungarian back­ ground. Lorant fled to England where he founded IIIus·

trated Weekly

and later, in

1938, Picture Post,

both of

which were enormously successful. With his wife and

The Birth of Photoiournalism in Germany

13 I

two sons, Dr. Erich Salomon fled to Holland where he had relatives. A Jew, he and one of his sons were mur­ dered at Auschwitz ten years later. Almost all the mem­ bers of the Dephot News Service left. Felix H. Man, an avid democrat who happened to be abroad at the time of Hitler's rise to power, never returned to Germany. He became Lorant's colleague in England along with Kurt Hubschmann, who changed his name to Hurton. Ina Bandy worked for the magazine

Vu in Paris. Alfred Eisen­

staedt and Fritz Goro settled in America, where they be­ came staff photographers for Life. Andrei Friedmann, who had begun his career as a photographer with the Dephot News Service at seventeen, went to France where

1 3 2 Photography & Society

Lucien Aigner used a Leica to catch Hitlers lazy response to the salutes of the athletes' parade at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch Partenkirchen, Germany. Thinking Hitler would appear as a blur in the photo, Aigner did not print the negativeunrilyears later, many years after Hitler had driven some of Germany's best photographers from the country.

he took the pseudonym Capa -a name that would soon become famous.'23 He lOun C ded Magnum in 1 947 · All the creators of modem photojournalism in Germany spread their ideas abroad, exerting a decisive influence on the

'11ustrated press In ' France, EngI and, and the United States.

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Chosen for their loyalry to the Third Reich, the new ', editors of German magazines were permitted to publish ' only photographs that were sent to them by o fficial or­ gans. The most powerful figure in the new illustrated

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: press was Heinrich Hoffmann, who had been born in 1885

!' at Furth near Darmstadt, where his family owned a pho-

In 1908, at the age of twenry-three, he set up his own business as a photographer in Munich. Early in 1919, a revolutionary movement proclaiming a

Co tography business.

Sovict republic broke out in Bavaria, but was suppressed

by the Reichswehr in a bloody battle. One of the revolu­ rionary leaders was assassinated and others fled. During these months of civil war in Munich, Heinrich Hoffmann took many photographs that he sold to newspapers all over the world for large sums of money. Toward the end of 1919, when Hitler's newly founded parry was made up

of only half a dozen followers, the powerful Hearst news­

papers offered Hoffmann $ 5 ,000 to obtain photographs of Hitler. Hoffmann joined the Nazi party in order to get these photographs. He became one of Hitler's most inti­ mate friends, won his absolute confidence, and was allowed to photograph the FUhrer in all sorts of poses. Hitler studied Hoffmann's pictures to determine the most advantageous movements and gestures for his speeches., When he came to power in 1933, Hitler gave Hoffmann,

his early companion, the exclusive right to publish photographs of him. That same year Hoffmann was

named a member of the Reichstag and in 1938 he received the title 'Herr Professor.' An astute businessman, Hoff­ mann exploited his exclusive rights to the utmost by creating a press service, forming a publishing house for Nazi propaganda, and surrounding himself with a staff

The Birth of Photo;ournalism in Germany

133

of photographers who were alone authorized to take pictures of Hitler and of official events. All photographs for the illustrated journals had to pass Hoffmann's in­ spection-even those intended for the rest of the world. He made an immense fortune, bought a great deal of property, acquired a collection of paintings, and married his daughter to the FUhrer of the German youth move­ ment, Baldur von Schirach. When the war broke out, Hoffmann organized a central photographic bureau in Berlin where all photographs tak­ en at the front were sent for approval. He selected only those he deemed most appropriate for German propagan­ da. His bureau was a veritable factory, processing copy prints for the entire world press. Only he could collect the reproduction fees. Duringthe American occupation of Bavaria, the Ameri­ can army confiscated Hoffmann's archives and used them to identify war criminals. In 1946, at the time of the Ger­ man war trials, Hoffmann was arrested and condemned as a proven profiteer of the Third Reich. He was given the maximum penalty of ten years at hard labor and the loss of his entire fortune. On 25 June 1948, the decision was reversed by another court, and his sentence was re­ duced to three years in a work camp. This decision was overturned on another technicality. The office ofthe direc­ tor of public prosecution in Munich increased Hoff­ mann's sentence once more, to five years, but released him in recognirion oftime served. Hoffmann was stripped of reproduction rights to his photographic archives for a ten-year period and lost his title of 'Herr Professor.' Out of his immense fortune he was allowed to keep only 5,000 marks for the support of his family. Eventually another court ruled that his name should be struck from the list of war criminals, on the grounds that he had only been an instrument of Hitler's policies. In 1957,

all proceedings against him were dropped. Hoffmann died at the end of that year, at the age of seventy-rwo.'24 Un-

134 Photography & Society

Heinrich HoHmann and his photographs helped Hitler establish an image that the world would not forget. Hoffmann had exclusive rights to publish pictUres of Hitler and profited greatly from that right throughout the regime's existence.

doubtedly, he was one of the Nazis who had profited most from the Hitler regime. In 1947, part of Hoffmann's confiscated archives was transferred to the National Archives in Washington. In the early sixties his son and heir, also named Heinrich, who remembers having sat on Hitler's lap as a child of three, won his suit to regain the reproduction rights to his father's photographic collection. Hoffmann

fils

now

owns the negatives that news services around the world profited from for so many years.

The liberal-spirited German magazines that flourished under the Weimar Republic were emulated elsewhere in Europe. The French magazine

Vu

was founded in 1928

by Lucien Vogel ( 1 886-1954), editor, journalist, printer, and talented designer. In 1906 he joined the art depart­

ment of Femina magazine. Several years later he became the director of Art et Decoration. In 1 9 1 2 he founded

la Gazette du Bon Ton and Ie Jardin des Modes. Lucien Vogel was a man of strong personality and very original ideas. He was affable, with bright blue eyes that reflected his great generosity and his resolute character. His fashion magazines carried the imprint of his refined Parisian taste and his liberal outlook. Starting with the first issue of

Vu, he broke away from the use of the single

photographs that had appeared for many years in Illus­ tration, one of the oldest French magazines. Vogel sur­ rounded himself with first-rate colleagnes, capable writ­ ers and journalists such as Philippe Soupault, whom he sent to Germany, or Madeleine Jacob, who had begun as a secretary on the editorial staff and was later sent as special correspondent to Austria. Ida Treat, an Ameri­ can, was his correspondent in Asia. He used the best photographers of the period, among them Germaine Krull, Andre Kertesz, Laure Albin-Guillot, Muncaszi, Lucien Aigner, Felix Harman, and Capa, whose celebrat-

The Birth of PbotoioumaJjsm in Germany

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ed picture of a Spanish Republican soldier falling under gunfire was first published in The first issue of

Vu

Vu

in I 9 3 6 .

appeared on 28 March I 928,

with Vogel's statement of intent: 'Conceived in a new spirit and executed by new means,

Vu brings

a new for­

mula to France: illustrated reporting on world events . . . . From any place where important events occur, pho­ tographs, dispatches, and articles will reach

Vu

linking

our readership with the entire world . . . and bringing the universality of life to the eye . . . pages packed with photographs translating foreign and domestic political events into images . . . sensationally illustrated photo­ stories . . . travel stories, analyses of causes

cei'ebres

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the most recent discoveries, carefully selected photo­ graphs . . . .' 136

Photography & Society

Lucien Vogel attracted tal­ ented photographers such as Raben Capa, Germaine Krull, and Andre Kertesz to his Vu, founded in 1928 after the model of the pre­ Hitler German photomag­ azine. Intended as a vehicle for eye-opening ne'"-"S paired with numerous photo­ graphs (oftentimes as many as four to a page), \'u lasted only a decade due to Vogel's unpopular politics and his successors' inability to maintain the editorial and reproduction quality of the early \'u, tViO indications that the magazine depended more on its audience than on its advertisers for sup­ port (left: Capa, Death of a

Spanish Soldier, 1 9 :; 6 ;

right: Gennaine Krull, Un­ titled; page 1 3 8 : Andre Ker­ tesz, Park in the Snow, 1928).

The Birth of Photojournalism in Germany

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PhotoK'aphy & Sodety

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Andre Kertesz, Park in the Snow. 1928.

The first issue contained more than 60 photographs and sold for 1 . 5 francs. Starting in 193 1, Vogel produced special issues presenting perceptive and courageous anal­ yses of world events. Views ofSoviet Russia and America Fights (dedicated to Roosevelt's New Deal) appeared in 193 I. The April 1932 issue on The German Enigma car­ ried 438 photographs in 1 2 5 pages. For the first time, the French public was warned against Nazism. A special issue on Italy, The Eleventh Year of Fascism, appeared in 1933, and Examination of China in May 1934. But the tone and subject matter of Vu (Vogel was simultane­ ously editing Lu, a kind of press digest) did not please its Swiss financial backers and failed to attract enough advertising, the financial backbone of magazines in a capitalist society. He alienated the large industries that might have bought advertising space by his undisguised support for the Left which, united in the Popular Front, had just won the 1936 election. At last the appearance of his special issue on the Spanish Civil War in the fall of 1936, supporting the Republican point ofview, utterly outraged Vu's backers and Vogel was forced to resigu. The magazine continued until 1938, but its quality dropped, and most of its readers drifted away. When Lucien Vogel died in 1954, stricken at his desk, Henry Luce cabled Vogel's family: 'Without Vu, Life would never have been created.' The ultimate tribute was thus paid to the man who had founded the first modem photographically illustrated magazine in France.

The Birth of Photo;ournalism in Germany

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LIFE BEGINS 140 Photography & Society

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American Mass Media Magazines

'Life begins': the caption beneath this opening photo of the first issue of Life mag­ azine (November 2.3. I936) read: 'The camera records the most vital moment in any life: Its beginning.' A photomagazine after the Gennan and Vu model, Life would succeed not only be­ cause of its photographs but also because of an advertis­ ing network that spanned the country. Life continued to survive until television took over the advertising market in the late I9605.

Three years after Hitler's takeover and the subsequent muzzling of the entire German press, a new illustrated magazine appeared in America that would become the most celebrated of its kind throughout the world. The first issue of Life magazine appeared on 23 November I936, with an initial printing of 466,000 copies. Circula­ tion reached one million a year later, and more than eight million by I972. Its success was unique and its format imitated almost everywhere. Life was not the first American magazine illustrated entirely with photographs. In I896, the New York Times had begun to publish a weekly photographic supplement, and other newspapers had followed its example. Mid­ Week Pictorial, Panorama, and Parade had all appeared, but none had Life's success. The idea itself was not new. Its realization was the result of many influences, the development of the cinema being the foremost. From the beginning of the twentieth century, film had gone beyond the vaudeville stage and had begun to attract millions of spectators to movie the­ aters daily. Photographic images were becoming familiar to the public and were beginning to shape its vision. The new style in photojournalism, that began with the Ger­ man illustrated magazines of the early thirties and was taken up later by the French magazine Vu, profoundly influenced Life's creators in their decision to illustrate stories with groups of photographs. Photographs by Dr. Salomon and Felix H. Man had already appeared in American magazines and become well known. Life hired many of the excellent photographers who fled Hitler and

consulted former contributors to the German illustrated press such as Korff and Szanfranski, both of whom had been with the Berliner Il/ustrirte. Finally, technical devel­ opments in photography, new monochrome printing and color processes, and the invention of the teleprinter for

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the rapid transmission of photographs all played impor­ tant roles in the creation of the new photographic maga­

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zine. But the most crucial factor in its success was its modem advertising system.

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Nearly all American magazines are entirely financed by advertising. Their profits depend on it. The advertis­ ing empire in America grew out of the shift from an agri·

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cultural to an industrial economy. As new industries

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grew, consumer goods were standardized and manufac­ tured in large quantities. The expansion of highways and

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railroads brought producers and consumets closer to­ gether. Because the country is so large, there were few

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national newspapers. Each region has its own daily pa­ pers, specializing in local news. Weekly or monthly mag­

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azines, on the other hand, can be distributed throughout the country and are easily available to everyone. National corporations began to place their ads in magazines.

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Between 1939 and 1952, the number of advertisers

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grew from 936 to :',538, and the number of products advertised jumped ftom 1,659 to 4,47:..125 Magazines

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were profoundly affected. Until the end of the nineteenth century, publishers had had complete control over the

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content of their magazines. As America increasingly be­

came a society of consumers, the powerful economic in­ centive of advertising forced changes in the publishers' role. From the time advertising became their major source

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ofprofit, publishers were no longer interested in the reader as reader, but in the reader as consumer. Periodicals

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no longer simply published stoties and illustrations. They became promoters of advertising copy and magazines

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became an integral part of the American marketing system.126 14:'

Photography & Society

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Since advertising rates depended on circulation, pub­ lishers were concerned with increasing their profits by increasing their circulation. They sought to make their magazines attractive to the majotiry of reader/consumers. With the advent of television these factors also changed; but we shall discuss that development later. During the sixties, fourteen out of every 100 advertis­

ing dollars invested in American magazines went to Life, which was read by approximately 40 million Americans.

Life was founded by Henry R. Luce, who had been born in China in 1898, the son of a Presbyterian minister. Luce's puritanical, Calvinist education, the austeriry of his upbringing, and his later studies at Yale all combined to make him a staunch conservative. His ideas were re­ flected in all his publications. From its poor beginnings his life drastically changed in a few decades. He became one of America's press lords, a transformation in the purest tradition of liberal American sociery during the first third of the century. l27 Luce and his Yale classmate Britton Hadden founded lime, Inc. in 1929. The name 'lime' occurred to him one evening while reading a subway ad. The young found­ ers, in their twenties at the time, realized that there was no magazine adapted to the fast pace of contemporary work life. Most people had little time to keep up with current events. Their idea was to create a magazine that would summarize the events of the previous week. Its beginning was modest. They had trouble finding the

$85,000 they needed to publish their first issue in March 1923. Since the magazine did not yet have its own news network from which to draw, stories in the first issues were taken from the New York Times and rewritten in a special sryle. This was possible at the time because the U.S. Supreme Court had recently ruled that news that had been public for more than twenry-four hours had entered the public domain.12• Time was an enormous SllCcesS, and when Life apAmerican Mass Media Magazines

143

peared in 1936, it was organized along the same lines. The editorial staff was divided into seventeen depart­ ments: domestic news, music, books, nature, sports, sci­ eoee,.fashion, feature articles, editorials, and so on. These

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departments were further subdivided: movies and the­

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ater, for example, were grouped under entertainment; art and religion under culture. Each department was headed by an editor and a researcher, to whom other as­ sistant editors and researchers reported. While all the

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researchers were women, the writers wefe generally cho­ sen from among young male university graduates, espe­

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cially from Luce's alma mater, Yale. Members of each department submitted a weekly report in which planned and finished stories were listed. The stories were then

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placed in the 'bank' (i.e., held in reserve), in many cases

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to be published much later or perhaps not at all. The editor-in-chief sent the most important feature stories to the printer and, with these selections in mind, chose the

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rest of the material for the week. If the feature news

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article seemed a bit long or heavy, he looked for lighter subjects to fill the remaining space and balance the issue.

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Other departments then got the chance to take stories out of the 'deep freeze' of their 'bank' and possibly see one

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published. These decisions were often made in the final hours before the magazine went to press. The news department was responsible for assembling

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news clippings that might lead to a stoty and for send­ ing these on to the proper departments. The researchers

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then forwarded these press clippings to the national or

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international news bureau chiefs who, if the subject seemed important, immediately wired them to Life cor­

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respondents around the world. When information on a particular subject was needed, researchers used the 'morgue,' where all press clippings and information on

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many subjects were filed.12' The head of the photography department dealt with all Life photographers and acted as liaison between them

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Photography & Society

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and the editorial departments. In addirion to distributing assignments, he was responsible for planning their work and travels and had the right to hire and fire. His posi­ tion within the magazine depended on his ability to elicit the utmost from his photographers. He had to be a good psychologist to be able to handle photographers, who are often touchy or anxious about their difficult tasks. Press photographers work under difficult and ttying circum­ stances and are always pressed for time. They must have iron constitutions, a good deal of courage, and qnick reflexes to be able to adapt to all kinds of situations. Their lives are often in danger, and many have paid for their boldness with their lives. They deal with people from all classes, and must know how to behave with equal ease at a royal court or with a primitive tribe. Re­ lations berween the head of

Life's

photography depart­

ment and his photographers were not always smooth. While they were in the field, often struggling with dif­ ficulties that seemed insurmountable, he issued orders from his office. Perhaps the most influential head of

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Life's

photogra­

phy department was Wilson Hicks, who held the position for thirteen years, from 1937 to 1950, during which time he groomed a whole generation of photographers, many of whom became famous. He was often unpopular with them because of his brusque carrot-and-stick manner; but those who worked with him had the deepest respect for his knowledge of photojournalism and for his rich imagination. 130 When a stoty was to be used, the photographs were sent to the art director for page layout and to an editor, who had to write the text in an exact number of words. He composed it on special yellow paper calibrated for the exact number of letter-spaces and lines that fit the predetermined text lengrh. Researchers checked out evety word and marked a red spot above each as it was veri­ fied. Copies of the article were then sent to a special ofAmerican

Mass Media Magazines

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fice where the contents were again checked by

Life spe­

cialists: historians, doctors, psychologists, educators, and

Life also used

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Life's great success possible was the enor­

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mous organization of lime, Inc. The corporation includ­ ed all of Luce's enterprises and was further expanded

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others. In addition to staff photographers, photographic agencies and &ee-lancers. What made

during the Second World War, when lime-Life Interna­ tional was founded with nearly 360 offices around the

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world, staffed by 6,700 people. Henry R. Luce began his journalistic career in I92I as

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a reporter for the

Chicago News

with a salary of $16 a

week. In I967, from his office on the thirty-fourth floor

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of New York's Rockefeller Center, Luce controlled a vast empire of businesses and publications that figured among

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America's 500 largest industries. More than 3 million copies of Time were printed weekly by then, and more

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than 8 million copies of

Life.

Luce also owned

SPOTts

Illustrated and Fortune, a magazine exclusively

for busi­ nessmen, both totaling over I3 million in circulation. In

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addition he owned a book publishing department, with

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annual sales around I7 million, five radio stations, six television stations, paper factories, forests, and oil wells

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in Texas. lime, Inc. earned more than $I5 million an­ nually, and Luce's personal yearly income was more than

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$1.25 million. When he died suddenly in I967 at the age of sixty-nine, he was at the height of his success. III

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to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the

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GO see life; to see the world, to eyewitness great events;

proud; to see strange things-machines, armies, multi­ tudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see

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man's work-his paintings, towers and discoveries, to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind

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walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and

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to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to s and be instructed.' With these words, Henry R. I46

Photography & Society

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had introduced the first issue of Life.'32 It was made up of ninety-six pages, one-third devoted to advertising. The cover photograph was by Margaret Bourke-White. Along with Alfred Eisenstaedt, Thomas McAvoy, and Peter Stackpole, she was part of the team of photojour­ nalists employed by the magazine. The cover photograph showing Fort Peck Dam in Montana introduced the fea­ ture stoty of the issue: nine pages on the New Deal's work relief program at Fort Peck. Not long after, Henty Luce became one of the New Deal's most bitter opponents and used his magazine to fight its policies. A single photograph filled the first page-a newly born

child held by an obstetrician, with the caption: 'Life be­ gins,' a pun introducing the first issue. The caption con­ tinued: �The camera records the most vital moment in life: its beginning.' Two pages on Chinese schoolchildren in San Francisco followed, after which there were photo­ graphs of Franklin Roosevelt. Four pages (three in color) on a popular painter named Curty came after the Presi­ dent, then four pages (one in color) on the 'greatest liv­ ing actress; Helen Hayes, and two pages on Rockefeller Like Vu, Life attracted some of the world's most talented and most famous photogra­ phers: Margaret Rourke­ White's Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936 (top) ap­ peared on the front cover of Life's first issue and Peter Stackpole's Golden Gate Bridge, c. 1935 (bottom), appeared during the first year.

Center and its radio station. There were also five pages devoted to Brazil, four to movie star Robert Taylor, one page on Saralt Bernhardt, and two on a new world weath­ er map. One page showed a one-legged man climbing a steep ridge in the mountains. Then there were two pages on Russian life, followed by two pages on the black widow spider, and finally a section entitled 'Life goes to a party,' which showed photographs of French aristocrats at a garden party. The first issue set the tone for Life. Months of work had gone into deciding what would please the greatest number of readers throughout the United States, what would awaken their curiosity and touch on their emo­ tional preoccupations and dreams of success. Life want­ ed to be understood by all, to be a magazine read by the entire family, and to popularize the sciences and arts. American Mass Media Magazines

147

A Look at the World's Week

•

and the memoirs of such celebrities as the Duke of Wind­ sor.The work of great writers, including Hemingway's

•

It carried such features as

The Old Man and the Sea, as well as essays on the world's great religions, would also be published there. 'I am a Presbyterian, a Republican and a capitalist. I am biased in favor of God, the Republican parry and

•

.!

Free Enterprise....Hadden and I invented Time. There­ fore we had a right to say what it would be. We're not

•

fooling anybody. Our readers know where we stand. We're telling the story to the best of our knowledge and

•

belief.' 133 Henry Luce's knowledge and beliefs corre­ sponded to the ideas of the small class of imporrant cap­ italists who controlled America's destiny.Luce never hid

•

his ideas.As he willingly admitted, Life was created first

•

to make profits and then to help the political programs which he thought best. Like his Presbyterian forebears, he, too, wanted to educate the masses. His magazine's

•

success was based on thorough study of mass psychol­

•

ogy. Man is above all interested in himself: any human and social condition affecting his own life will move him.

•

When conditions are miserable, he must be given the hope of a better future.From such reasoning flowed the

•

nine pages on the New Deal program in Montana, which promised work for a large group of poverry-stricken peo­

•

ple.1)te pictures of children struck a sentimental chord, while the photographs of the President symbolized the father-protector. The lives of actresses and movie stars

•

showed that talent would always be rewarded; and the

•

Life

reader was taught that science performs miracles. The adventures of a one-legged man responded to the

•

need for sensation; the photographs of Brazil, to the taste for the exotic.Finally, the garden parry photographs of

•

aristocrats brought the lives of the elite into everyone's home. The world reflected in Life was full of light and had

•

only a few shadows. It was ultimately a false world, one

•

148

Photography & Society

•

•

that inspired the masses with false hopes. It is equally true, however, that Life popularized the arts aod sciences, opened windows onto hidden worlds, and in irs own special way educated the masses. It contributed to the public's acquaintaoce with art, spending more thao $30 million on color art reproductions. Luce was a fervent patriot, and in his magazines nationalism played a central role. The vast majority of other magazines in America were created with the same point of view, but what gave Life's famous photographer catches Life's famous war correspondent at a pensive moment: Alfred Eisen­ staedt's Ernie Pyle. the C.l.'s Favorite War Re­ porter (1944).

$ credibility to Life was irs extensive use of photo­ l]9 the average man photography, which is the

so mU

graphs

exact reproduction of reality, cannot lie. Few people realize that the meaoing of a photograph can be chaoged completely by the accompanying caption, by its juxta­ position with other photographs, or by the maoner in which people aod evenrs are photographed. We shall

discuss this point later. 1 r The popularity of tIrIS' new journalism based almost �usively on photographs grew out of the changes that

had taken place in the condition of modern man aod the tendency toward greater standardization of modern life.

As the individual became less important to society, his need to affirm himself as an individual became greate

')

For example, the enormous success of war correspondent Ernie Pyle's stories from the front lay in the fact that instead of describing the lives of GIs in general, he wrote about what happened to Bob Smith from Brownsville, Texas, or to Jim Brown from Nashville, Tennessee. Mil­ lions of readers had the moral satisfacrion of being able to identify the fates of their own brothers, husbaods, or sons with those of the GIs described by Pyle. Read­ ers could visualize their loved ones among the mass of aoonymous soldiers because the characters in Pyle's sto­ ries were specific people they could imagine knowing. The success of the illustrated weeklies is based on the same phenomenon. In addition to current events, they present stories about ordinary people whose names are Amenam Mass Media Magazines

149

always mentioned. As the relations among men became more dehumanized, the journalist tended to give the in­ dividual an artificial importance.

Life was enormously successful and was read by the masses. It was a family magazine that refused to pub­ lish anything shocking. But toward the end of the sixties, Life, Look, Holiday, and other general-interest maga­ zines were having problems. Of all the lime, Inc. proper­ ties, Life had been the most profitable. Now it began to lose money. One of the causes was inflation. The price

•

of everything needed to produce a magazine had risen considerably. In 1971 it was estimated that expenses had increased 35 percent over the previous year. The owners of large American magazines were forced to take drastic measures. Life shut down offices in America and abroad, reduced the number of its staff, and terminated the un­

•

•

profitable Spanish edition. Soon the international edition

•

also folded. Previously,

•

Life

had maintained a 'blanket coverage'

policy under which the most detailed research possible was carried out on each subjecr by as many as twenty

•

journalists and photographers who were sent wherever necessary. Here is an example of Life's methods of assur­ ing complete coverage of an exclusive story:

•

•

On Monday, 5 February 1965, 65 million Americans (at

the time Life was printing around seven million copies) were

•

offered twenty-two-and-a-half pages, twenty in color. on Wmston Churchill's funeral. The story required seventeen photographers, more than forty journalists and technicians, a dozen motorcyclists, two helicopters, and one DC-S. Two

years earlier, a researcher had drawn up a highly confidential list of all that was to happen upon the death of Wmston Churchill-the nature and location of the ceremony, the parade route, the site of the tomb, and the day of the funeral, which had a 90 percent chance of falling on a Saturday.'A list was prepared of private rooms in which Life photographers could work in total secrecy. As soon as Churchill feU

150 Photography & Society

ill, the

• • • • • • •

l

Ufe"s 'blanket coverage' of stories such as Wmston Churdilll's funernl (pages 15>-153) Iccpt the magazine afloat and popular with readc;rs. despite the compe­ tition with lV. Life faltered not because it declined in popularity but because the advertisers who financed the magazine switched to 1V to reach a larger audi­ ence.

rooms were rented. Life ordinarily appeared on Mondays, putting the issue to bed on the previous Wednesday evening. Special arrnngements were made to hold off prinring the Churchill issue until Saturday night, and to provide for dis­ tribution by air rather than by surface mail. There was nothing else left to do but to wait for the old lion to die.

As predicted, the burial took place on Saturday. Every pho­

tographer was in his place. The films were to be picked up at five points-Westminster Hall, Saint Paul's, Trafalgar Square, a wharf on the Thames, and Blandon, where the burial took place. Fifteen days earlier, rooms in three houses with win­ dows overlooking the cemetery had been rented, and three photographers were on location forry-eight hours before the announcement came that photographs of the burial itself were forbidden.

(Life did not publish these photographs.)

Motorcyclists carried the films to the airpon, where the spe­ cially rented airplane was waiting. Its interior had been transformed into an editing room with typewriters and ta­ bles. A comfortable laboratory was installed in the front of the plane, and hooked up to a special electrical system. A very large table had also

been

set up to display the photo­

graphs for page layout, and light boxes were ready for exam­ ining the developed color slides. Finally, there was a small reference library for correspondents, containing the ten vol­ umes of Churchill's works.

The airplane left New York the day before the ftmeral with 40 members of the editorial staff on board, among them the

six specialists who would develop the 70 rolls of color film. It took the airplane slightly more than eight hours to cross the 8,500 miles between London and Chicago, where the

Life printing

plant was located. Selected documents, page

layouts, and the accompanying detailed captions were pre­ pared during the trip. In order to avoid the winds that could have caused a delay, the airplane headed north and flew just below the Arctic Circle. Page after page was prepared. When Lake Michigan, with Chicago on its banks, appeared, the work was finished.l34

American Mass Media Magazines

IS I

THE PROCESSION MARCHES THROUGH HISTORY HE HAD MADE H

by ALAN MOOREHEAO

THEN TO BLADON

The coverage cost about $250,000. 'Our readers are first to benefit,' wrote the publisher. 'The story has shown that all the parts of the chain linking the event to the reader held up. We have scored a point against television.' Competition with television was already be­ ginning to haunt

Life's

publishers at the beginning of

1965. Several years later, it had become a serious prob­ lem, forcing them to reduce their staff considerably.

In the hope of making the magazine profitable once again they experimented with various changes. More emphasis was placed on the text, for example. PhotogIaphic stories designed for twelve-page coverage were cut in half. On one occasion

Life even strayed from its customary moral

code by pUblishing reports on the Mafia and corruption, in order 'to please young readers.' But most readers pro­ tested vigorously, and this kind of yellow journalism was abandoned. The crisis seems incomprehensible in view of Life's ex­ traordinary success with the public. At its peak, there were close to 8.6 million subscribers, a number never achieved by any other illustrated magazine. Too many subscribers, however, are not an asset, especially in in­ flationary times. Postal expenses increased 170 percent in five years, while advertising contracts, negotiated for relatively long periods of time and providing sustained revenues, were frozen. Advertisers, moreover, had lost confidence. In 1966, Life had sold 3,300 pages of advertising for close to 170 million dollars. Two years later it sold only 2,761 pages for about $154 million, reflecting a loss of sixteen percent. In 1969, the deficit glew to $10 ntillion, and losses conrinued in the following years.IlS On 3I October 1970, the New York Times reported that Time, Inc. had sold eleven local radio and television stations for $80.1 ntillion. The report pointed out that the sellers, surprisingly enougiI, were getting rid of profitable busi­ nesses to keep others, like Life, that were losing money. 154 Photography & Society

The managers of TIme, Inc. had not lost hope that the magazine would once again show a profit.136 In 1970 a four-color full-page ad in Life cost $64,000 and reached a readership of 40 million. For the same amount of money, an advertiser could buy one minute of television time on one of the most popular programs, for example Laugh-In, reaching 50 million viewers. On 9 December 1972, a front-page headline in the International Herald Tribune read, 'Life magazine dead at 36.' TIme Inc. had finally decided to terminate publica­ tion, much to the surprise of the enrire world press. Every newspaper, television, and radio station reported the end of the most important illustrated weekly. The last issue came out on 28 December 1972. The death of Life sig­ naled the end of a whole period of photojournalism. At the New York Stock Exchange, the sudden rise of TIme Inc. stock indicated that the large American publishing conglomerate had regained the confidence of investors by ridding itself of Life's deficits. Since its beginnings in the 1940s, television had made immense progress, becoming a formidable rival to maga­ zines. In 1949, there were 69 stations in America; by 1970, more than 800. The French newspaper Le Monde recently published statistics indicating that every French­ man between the ages of two and sixty-five will spend eigiIt years of his life in front of a television set. The image on the small screen, however fleeting, does communicate the news, often at the very moment that events occur. Life, on the other hand, appeared ouly once a week, filling out news and political events already known to millions of television viewers. The only magazines un­ affected by this crisis were the higiIly specialized ones like those financed by drug companies and read by doctors. Women's magazines, pornography, and magazines cater­ ing to regional interests are among the few independent magazines that can hold their readerships today. Special­ ized magazines which provide depth coverage suffered American Mass Media Magazines

155

,1 less competition from television. The lime Inc. managers accordingly decided to consider several possible maga­ zines specializing in the areas of health, vacations, food, film, money, and children. The first of these magazines,

Money, appeared in October 1972. In April 1972, when the managers of lime Inc., Hed­ ley Donovan and Andrew Heiskell, announced the new monthly magazine to the press, they pointed out that most people did not know how to manage their finances. In his statement to the stockholders, Donovan declared that 'Money will not make you rich, no magazine of conscience can promise that. But a reading of successive issues should help the reader to gain a greater measure of control over his personal finances . . . .

Money will be­

gin with a minimum national circulation of 225,000 copies, mostly in prepaid subscriptions. . . .' 137 Using the same format as

Time, Money appeared con­

taining 104 pages, 48 of which were devoted to advertis­ ing. Readers in the United States had been accustomed to low prices for magazines. 'Departing from traditional consumer magazine economics, we are asking our read­ ers to pay a substantial share of the magazine's costs,' the stockholders were told. They hoped this would allow them a cenain financial independence from advertising. In the early seventies, inflation began to reach Europe, where illustrated magazines were hit hard for the same reasons as those in America. In Europe, too, television had become a threat despite the restrictions on TV ad­ vertising in France and in other countries where televi­ sion is a nationalized industry. In 1956 Paris-Match, the largest French illustrated magazine, was printing 1.8 mil­ lion copies. In 1967, its circulation had dropped to 1,382.,000, and in April 1972, its printing was no more than 810,72.2.. 138 For many years, Paris-Match, Le Figaro, Tel" Sept Jours, Marie-Claire, Parents, and radio Luxembourg all belonged to the textile magnate Jean Prouvost. He sug1 5 6 Photography & Society

gested a change in formula to help save whose goal had always been to imitate

Paris-Match, Life. During this

crisis Prouvost turned once again to America, and invited

the graphic designer of the immensely successful

York Magazine (founded The size of Paris-Match

New

in 1968) to come to his aid. was slightly reduced; photo­

graphs now filled no more than 50 percent of the maga­

zine, and the text was expanded to include new sections

written expressly for the French. Articles were written on technical and scientific innovations that would affect

French life. The pages devoted to Patis gossip were also increased.

Paris-Match

began to cover such sensational

stories as the scandal involving the publication of nude

photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, or the his­

tory of Playboy. Its price was raised but according to the editors, the sale of these first revamped issues also in­

creased. The former Life team, however, was skeptical. They, too, had tried in vain to save their magazine by introducing new formats. The success of an illustrated magazine remained problematic because the public had lost interest not only in this kind of magazine but in

the press in general. As the pace of life quickens, the time for reading diminishes. According to official statis­

tics, 85 percent of the French population keeps up with

the news through government radio and television broad­ casts, or through radio programming from ou de

W

France, which is also regulated by the governmendlhe mass media, while claiming to be objective, in reality

are managed by people who are constantly censored or

forced to censor themselves. News broadcasts on nation­ al television or radio networks are bound to manipulate public opinion in the name of those in power.

J

The professional photojournalist was deeply affected by the changes in the illustrated press. In order to remain

in the field, the photojournalist had to find other markets. Some of the photographers who had worked for the large

American magazines were able to find work with trade

American Mass Media Magazines

157

,I journals published by industrial giants. Corporate pub· lications had previously been rather tiresome reports mainly filled with figures, but in recent years their make­ up and contents had been changing radically. Today they are interesting magazines produced with considerable care and expense, carrying articles by well-known writers and journalists. Photographic coverage is assigned to im­ portant and well-paid photographers. Most of these pub­ lications are given away upon request, while others are house organs especially written for thousands of compa· ny employees. The goal of these magazines, to publicize the company's products, is often disguised in articles and photostories that appear to have no direct relationship to the company. mM, for instance, is never mentioned in its magazine

Think. In Europe,

many similar magazines

are published by large concerns-/'Electricite de France,

Credit Foncier, or

those published by the drug industry.

Other photographers have been recycled into jobs with publishing houses that need photographs to illustrate

•

their books. A few photographers have turned to tele­ vision and specialize in documentaries, but selling these

•

films is difficult unless they deal with exceptionally up-to­ date subjects. A new market for photographic archives

•

has been created by the numerous encyclopedias that have been published all over the world in the last few years. Their publishers had the clever idea of selling encyclopedias in weekly installments at newsstands, at the same price as weekly magazines. At the end of the year, the publisher provides a binding for the volumes. These encyclopedias are highly marketable because they offer quantities of color photographs at a reasonable price. (International co-publication considerably reduces production costs.) The text is written in a pseudoscien­ tific style, easily understood by ever yone. These encyclo­ pedias are successful primarily because they manage to give the reader the impression that he is achieving a better

158

Photogmphy & Society

understanding of our world and the increasingly complex technological environment in which we live. In the last few years, astute social observers have no­ ticed a change that seems promising for the photojour­ nals, assuming that television was one of the essential elements in the death of Life magazine in 1972.. While it seems probable that many mothers use TV as a baby­ sitter, and that it has become a daily companion for the older generation, the generation in between may be turn­ ing its back on the tube. A young man who works for the post office in France bitterly complained, 'I grew up in a small village where people gathered every night to sing or tell stories. Now every family is closed off in its house, watching TV. My generation sees this as the destruction of human relations.' The trend can be seen not only in France, but in other countries as well, the u.s. included. Marketing analyses have found that althOUgh people can get quick information from television, they want not only more time to look at images, but want to keep them as well. Another factor in this evolution is the tremendous interest in photography as an art. For these reasons among others, the publishers of Life have reissued the magazine as of October 1978. They have raised its price considerably to avoid complete de­ pendence upon the advertisers who previously aban­ doned the magazine for television, and they will publish it monthly; but television is no longer the overwhelming competitor of the illustrated magazine.

American Mass Media Magazines

159

ADOLF- DER OBERMENSCH

.1

• • •

• • • • • • •

•

•

•

SCHLUCKT GOLD UNO REDET BLECH

•

•

Photography

Photography in its many forms proved to be viable political tools, not only to propagandize but also to express public outrage, en­ courage national confi­ dence, and ridicule public figures. John Heartfield's photomontage left little to the imagination in his por­ trayal of Hitler's biological needs. However, contri­ vances were not always necessary to make a com­ ment-simple photographs taken out of context or positioned in a calculated way could likewise affect the enormous magazine­ reading audiences.

as

a Political Tool

The current demand for press photographs has led free­ lance photographers to join photographic agencies that serve as intermediaries between the photographer and the press. One of the first such agencies was set up in America by George Grantham Bain (1865-1944). Bain began as a magazine writer who also photographed his own stories. He soon realized that publishers almost always held onto his prints, but discarded his articles when they received others on the same subject. At the time sending photographs alone to the press was still an unknown service. Sensing the business potential, Bain founded several agencies in 1898, including the Montauk Photo Concern. He hired professional photographers, among them, Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952), one of America's first female photographers to make a name for herself. She was the only woman delegate at the Third International Photographic Convention in Paris in 1900. With Alfred Stieglitz, she represented America.'39 The ever-increasing demand for photographs led to a proliferation of press agencies all over the world. They hired photographers or signed contracts with free-lance photographers. Most agencies took a 50 percent cut, sometimes more, claiming that they had to share their profits with other agencies around the world. The pho­ tographer, who had taken all the material risks, had no way of controlling the sale of his photographs. It was for this reason that Robert Capa and a few colleagues founded the Maguum Agency in 1947.

For the photographers of the Magnum Agency, to which I also belonged between I947 and I954, photog­ raphy was not only a way of making money but a means of expressing their own feelings and ideas about con­ temporary problems. Capa, for example, refused pub­ lication of an important photostory entitled

Youth,

World

which had been the result of an expensive Mag­

num effort on a worldwide scale. The publisher who originally accepted the idea wanted to impose changes that would have altered the spirit of the article. It was finally published six months later in

Holiday,

which

agreed to reproduce it exactly as it had been conceived. Few photojournalists, however, are able to impose their own points of view. It takes very lirtle on the part of an editor to give photographs a meaning diametrically opposed to the photographer's intention. I experienced this problem from the outset of my career. Before the Second World War, share trading at the Paris Stock Ex­ change still took place outdoors, under the arcades. One day I took a series of photographs there, using a certain stockbroker as my principal target. Sometimes smiling, sometimes distressed, he was always mopping the sweat from his round face and urging the crowd with sweeping gestures. I sent these photographs to several European magazines with the harmless title, 'Snapshots ofthe Paris Stock Exchange.' Sometime later, I received clippings from a Belgian newspaper which, to my surprise, had printed my photographs with a headline reading: 'Rise

•

in the Paris Stock Exchange: stocks reach fabulous

•

prices.' Thanks to some clever captions, my innocent little story took on the air of a financial event. My astonishment bordered on shock when I discovered the

•

same photographs sometime later in a German news­

•

paper with yet another caption: 'Panic at the Paris Stock Exchange: fortunes collapse, thousands are tuined.' My photographs illustrated perfectly the stockbroker's de­ spair and the speculator's panic as stock value dropped.

I62 Photography & Society

•

The two publications had used my photographs in oppo­ site ways, each according to its own purpose. The objec­ tivity of a photograph is only an illusion. The captions that provide the commentary can change the meaning entirely. 140 In December 1956, under the headline 'Information or Propaganda?' the weekly

I'Express

published a double

series of identical photographs taken during the Hun­ garian rebellion. The pictures are identical, but their order had been changed and the captions had been modi­ fied by the editor. The idea was to show how various government-run television stations could have used the same pictures to give absolutely contradictory but apU parently truthful versions of the same eveut. For example: Under a photograph showing a Russian tank in a street:

First caption: 'In contempt of the people's right to self­ determination, the Soviet government has sent armored divisions to Budapest to suppress the uprising.'

Second caption: 'The Hungarian people have asked the Soviets for help. Russian tanks have been sent to pro­ tect the workers and to restore order.' Under a photograph of Janos Kadar:

First caption:

'Under the protection of Soviet tanks,

the Stalinist Janos Kadar has formed a new government and established a reign of police terror.' Second caption: 'Thanks to the drastic measures taken by the new government, formed by Janos Kadar and unanimously supported by the populace, the rebellion has been put down.' Under a photograph of two young Hungarians:

First caption: 'Despite the bloody repression by Soviet troops, Hungarian youth continues to fight, shouting, "Death rather than slavery.'"

Photography as a Political Tool

163

Second caption: 'Despite government appeals, fanatic counterrevolutionaries have refused to lay down their arms and have continued their hopeless struggle.'

>,

In September 1967, during the Biafran War, the West German magazine Stern published an investigative piece entitled 'The Mercenaries and Their Paradise.' The arti­ de was illustrated with photographs taken mostly in the Bukavu region by the photographer Paul Ribeau. A week

•

later, the Paris-based magazine Jeune Afrique repro­ duced excerpts from this artide along with one of the

•

photographs showing the tortured bodies of two Mri­ cans hanging by their arms from a tree. Within the week, the same photographs had dunged captions. The Ger· man readers had read: 'Soldiers of the Congolese Na· tional Army took these Katanga policemen prisoner and hung them from trees, leaving them to starve to death. Schramme's white mercenaries saved their lives.' Readers

•

of Jeune

•

Afrique, a

weekly with a considerable Mrican

readership, read the caption: 'Soldiers of the Congolese National Army, prisoners of the mercenaries.' On

4

October

1967, Le Monde

published a letter to

the editor signed by Paul Ribeau entitled: 'The Truth about a Controversial Photograph': The men hanging from the tree are neither Congolese sol­ diers nor Katanga policemen. As the photograph clearly shows, one of the two is in civilian clothes-light pants and

• • • •

a dark shin. In this country where mercenaries, Katanga policemen, and Mobutu's policemen 3re aU sensitive to the

•

prestige of the uni£onn, fighters do not wear civilian clothes. In fact the two men were civilians who had committed the crime of working

as

servants to the mercenaries. They had

heen captured by the Congolese National Anny who treated them as traitors, tortured them and hung them still alive from

the branches of a palm tree. They were freed by mercenaries who had unexpectedly returned to the area. I should add that

it is extremely rare for the Congolese National Anny to be satisfied with simply torturing its enemies. Torture usually

164 Photography & Society

• • • I I

•

I.

precedes the cutting up of the parts of the body with a machette which, in rum. is sometimes followed by a cannibal festival. While this is not frequent, human bones have been found near Bukavu, right next to a wood fire. I have photo­ graphs showing what remains of men, women, and children executed by the Congolese National Anny. Unfortunately, human life is cheap in the Congo today. I would like to point out that I am not the author of the captions attached to my photographic essays as they recently appeared in various French, English, American, German, and Italian publica­ tions. I was surprised to read in

Jeune Afrique

the essay

from the Gennan magazine Stern....

Calculated juxtaposition is another way of changing the meaning of photographs. In 1936, Life published a photostory I had done on the distressed areas of England. These highly industrialized regions had been the centers of prosperous industries during the last century, but they were hard hit by World War I and the great economic crisis that followed. Most of these industries dated from the nineteenth century and used antiquated methods. They were unable to meet competition from modem factories, and found it more expedient to abandon rather than to modernize the old factories. The owners left the region but the population remained to suffer. In 1936, there were more than two million unemployed in England. When I arrived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the entire ciry was unemployed. The naval shipyanls, with their buildings almost in ruins, looked as thouglt they had gone througlt a war. Among the tangled and rusry rails, rank weeds and a few flowers were growing wild. I felt as if I were visiring a cemetery. I took photographs of miser­ able men in rags, weakened and reduced to inactiviry for years, who lived on subsidies which barely kept them and their families from starving to death. At Witton Park, in Bishop Auckland's diocese, I photographed families with more than eigltt people living in one room. The women

Photography as a Political Tool

165

�l! with ravaged faces did not have the money to pay their rent or feed their families. 'What will become of our children?' they kept asking me in despair. During the same period the Simpson scandal broke out. King Edward was in love with an American divor­ cee. All the newspapers raged against him. English moral­ ity, still imbued with strict Victorian standards, could not accept Mrs. Simpson as queen. America was deeply offended by British public opinion. Life published my photographs under the innocuous heading: 'This Is What Englishmen Mean by the De­ pressed Areas.' Right next to my pictures of poverty­ stricken people they had inserted a full-page photograph of Queen Maty in a lace dress and covered with jewels.

A case study in calrulated juxtaposition of photo­ graphs: Life's coverage of the depressed areas of En­ gland shared the same page­ spread as the bejeweled Queen Mother in an article which was originally in­ tended to document the economic crisis suffered by post-war Britain but which ultimately served to criticize the British for their failure to accept an American di­ vorcee as their queen (photographs by Gisele Freund).

• • • • •

With a four-strand pearl choker around her neck, she was holding one of her grandsons on her lap and was flanked by the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, who

•

were entrancing in their immaculate dresses. The brutal contrast made any caption pointless. Mrs. Simpson was avenged in the eyes of liberal America. Here is another example which shows how a photo­

•

story can be subtly turned into advertising. In Canada, military service is not obligatory. To encourage young men and women to enlist, the Canadian army launched

..

a sizable billboard advertising campaign during the

..

1950S. Its goal was to identify military service with tour­ ism: 'Enlist and See the World.' Weekend Magazine, a

•

Sunday supplement for a chain of Canadian newspapers with a circulation in the millions, rushed one of its best journalists to Europe to write the article. I was assigned to take the photographs. As soon as we arrived at Zwei­ brucken, Gertnany, where the Royal Canadian Air Force base was located, the journalist advised me to concentrate on the young women's barracks. 'Study them carefully

..

and choose the one who best represents the ideal young

•

Canadian woman: a typical girl parents can recognize as their own daughter, and brothers as their sister.' 166 Photography & Society

"

•

• .

lIE IIrI6SII lIDS

--"'------_ ...-

"�.111"".w_

Photography as a Political Tool

167

The young woman who seemed to fit these require­ ments best was named Sonia Nichols. She was unassum­ ing, smiling, photogenic. She had blond hair and blue eyes and she became the heroine of the article which ap­ peared several weeks later under the title 'Airwomen Overseas.' The story told how twenty-year-old Sonia, born in Berwick, Novia Scotia, had never had the op­ portunity to leave her native town before joining the R.C.A.F. Since joining the army, she had seen a good part of her own country and had traveled through Germany,

Another means of. manipu­ lation: the eclectic choice of photographs to illustrate an event. 'The camera angle de­ tennines whether a person appears likeable. repulsive, or ridiculous,' as Duncan's critic demonstrated in his choice of Nixon iI1ustra­ rions.

•

•

,

, ,I !

Paris, and Switzerland. Before the end of her tour of duty,

.'

she would undoubtedly visit Italy and Scandinavia. At the base, she learned foreign languages, mingled with the

•

local people, went with friends to see the countryside and other points of interest. She participated in sports in

an

•

ultramodern gymnasium and swam in a beautiful

pool. Sonia's life had become altogether exciting and full of experiences that she would never have otherwise had.

•

My photographs, which took up several pages of the text, showed Sonia holding the baby of her new German

•

friends, swimming in a pool, playing basketball, walking in the country, and studying peasant life. All these photo­

•

graphs were in black and white, except for one of Sonia

•

talking with a young soldier. The caption read simply: 'With A.C.I. Peter Colliver, Streetville, Ontario, who is pulling a Saber Jet onto the runway.' The photograph clearly suggested the possibility of meeting other young

•

people in the army and prompted all sorts of sentimental daydreaming. Judging from my photographs, taken ac­

•

cording to the directions of the Canadian journalist, life in the army was a real picnic. I had not neglected to photograph Sonia at her secretary's desk, but the pub­ lisher had left out those pictures. The full-color cover

•

photograph showed a smiling Sonia in uniform saluting against a blue sky. Sonia became the celebrity of the week in Canada. She received numerous letters, including sev­

•

eral marriage proposals. Canadian army enlistments in168 Photography & Society

•

•

creased. This photostory was what Daniel J. Boorstin would call a pseudo-event, and Sonia was a pseudo­ celebriry entirely fabricated for a particular cause. tOt A political figure can easily be ridiculed by an unat­ tractive photograph. The most intelligent man can ap­ pear idiotic if he is photographed with his mouth wide open or with his eyes squinting. Here is just one example among thousands: In October 1969, the New

York Times Book Review

published a long article on David Douglas Duncan's Self­

portrait U.S.A., a book containing more than three hun­ dred photographs taken during the 1968 Republican and Democratic Conventions. The review was illustrated with four of the book's least flattering photographs of Richard M. Nixon, the Republican Party candidate. Taken out of context, these images made Nixon appear stupid and unattractive. The critic's commentary was as follows: 'There are perhaps a dozen Richard Nixons here who to the best of my knowledge have never been encountered before. (It's a small world and an improbable one: Navy Lieutenant Nixon and Marine Lieutenant Duncan met in the Solomon Islands a few wars back and became fast friends. Thus it came to pass that Duncan, and Duncan alone, was given the run of the Nixon penthouse at Miami Beach. Historians may learn as much by consulting these Nixon pictures as by studying tons of correspondence: 142 What the reviewer failed to mention was that the four photographs printed with his article were counterbal­ anced in the book by other flattering photographs of Nixon. The camera angle determines whether a person appears likable, repulsive, or ridiculous. A photograph of General de Gaulle, for example, taken from above, lengthens his nose, but taken from below, his chin is en­ larged and his forehead broadened. The use of the photo­ graphic image thus becomes an ethical problem because it can be used deliberately to falsify. In June 1966, Paris-Match, with a circulation of more Photography as

a

Political Tool

169

than 1.2 million copies, published an eight-page article called 'With the Nazis in 1966.' Everyone at the time expected that the extreme rightist German National Democratic Parry would do very well in the provincial elections scheduled to take place a month later. Twenry years had passed since World War II, but the French, still traumatized by the Nazi atrocities, felt threatened by the parry that played on nostalgia for the Third Reich. As the subject was very topical, the

Paris-Match

edirors

considered the story important enough to feature on the cover. The picture story began with a full-page color photo­ graph of a young man wearing a swastika armband around his white shirt, who was raising a toast to three other young men. An immense Nazi flag hung on the wall in the background. The caption read, 'German Nazis with Third Reich relics, drinking beer and singing Horst Wessel Lied in chorus.' Pictures of Bavarian villagers and their mayor followed; captions explained that they were former Nazis, although nothing in the photographs sug­ gested it. The story ended with some photographs of the new parry's founder and a sensational two-page spread in black and white showing young men in SS uniform. The caption read: 'At the home of Peter Breuer, a citizen of Munich, who owns a collection of 400 SS and SA uniforms. A great enthusiast of the Third Reich, he salutes the bust of Hitler.' A few days later, the English

Express

Daily

(more than 4 million copies) printed the first of

these sensational photographs, and in the U.S.S.R. the same photograph was shown on television, reaching IOO million viewers. But the photographs were frauds. One of the

Paris­

Match editors had rented costumes from a dealer

by the

name of Breuer and had convinced some young Germans to pose as a joke. The group of men raising their beer glasses were firemen from a Bavarian village who had

170 Photography & Society

been given a barrel of beer by the French editor and told to drink to Franco-German friendship. The German gov­ ernment protested through its press, publishing many articles denouncing the hoax in detail. But Paris-Match never retracted the article, and millions of French, Eng­ lish, and Russians who had seen these photographs be­ lieved them to be genuine. In the summer of 1975, another affair took place which also caused a stir. During a strike at the Chaus­ son factory in Paris, several French newspapers published front-page photographs of men leading dogs with the caption 'Policemen inside a factory with dogs trained to attack the strikers.' Later it was learned that the pho­ tographs were taken at the guard's entrance to the Paris Fair.

The meaning of a photograph can also be distorted by using a paintbrush or a pair of scissors. A few examples of falsification through retouching and cropping were published in the magazine

Photo

in June 1970. In one

photograph, Alexander Dubcek, who had fallen into dis­ favorfollowing Czech 'normalization,' had been removed from the otiginal negative so that he was no longer shown beside President Svoboda receiving the salutes of the crowd. Only the flagstones, which did not fit together properly, and the different position of a building bore witness to the deception. With drawings, the magazine showed how the photograph had been faked. During the two world wars, both the German press and the Allied press were filled with doctored photo­ graphs. As a rule, only carefully chosen, encouraging photographs were published. The censors on both sides suppressed photographs showing anything that might hurt the war effort, such as camouflaged factories, fortifi­ cations, artillery sites. They also avoided showing pho­ tographs of the destruction and suffering caused by their own armies in enemy countries. John Morris, a Life pho-

Photography as a Political Tool

171

tographic editor in London during the last war, wrote in an article published in Harper's Magazine in Septem­ ber 1972: The faces of the severely wounded and the dead were taboo. so the 'next of kin' would not be offended . . . Finally, and this is crucial to an understanding of the fonnulation of pub­ lic opinion at long range, the photographer did not show his side being ghastly. I recall the candor of the British cen­ sor through whom I attempted to pass some pictUres of the charnel of air-raid victims in Berlin. 'Very interesting,' he said. 'You may have them ilier the war.' The statement did not reflect the censor's personal feel­ ings, but it was part of a carefully planned effort to prevent the publication of photographs capable of awakening the public's conscience and making the war unpopular. The indoctrination of the photographers themselves was so great that, convinced they were fighting for a just cause, they censored themselves and did not photograph scenes that appeared unfavorable to the countries they represented: 'The standard operating procedure estab­ lished during WWII was to show our side fighting clean­ ly-bombs away in the brilliant sunshine of daring day­ light raids. We could show a certain amount of suffering from their wanton attacks, but never so much as to lead to despair. 'Photographically, their side lived by similar rules. You will never find a picrure of Hitler inspecting dIe gas ovens of a concentration camp. And the Japanese were not shown picrures of dIe men dIey maimed at Pearl Harbor; dIey saw dIe spectacle of their victory from dIe air. Just as we gave our people the beautiful mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.'143 This state of mind changes only when a war becomes openly unpopular. John Morris asserts that the change was first noticeable toward the end of the war in Korea where photographers witnessed a double tragedy: the 172

Photography & Society

As photography began to exhibit its potential to re­ veal more and more, it was manipulated to show less and less. War-time photog­ raphy is a perfecr example: pictures of cheering crowds, such as Werner Bischofs

Children ofHiroshima Cheering their Sovereign (1 9 5 1), were used to boost

national confidence at a time when suffering at home threatened the nation's mo­ rale.

first was that of American GIs who had to fight in a war they did not understand; the second that of a people tom asunder by war in their homeland.144 The conflict reached its height with the Viemam War, which caused such serious divisions in American public opinion. The photographic press and television played an im­ portant role in awakening the public conscience, but only to a certain extent. There is no official censorship in the United States; but during the two world wars photogra­ phers censored themselves because they believed it was necessary to support the cause. As years went by, how­ ever, and as the destruction in Vietnam by American bombers became so horrifying, press photographers on locarion were overwhelmed. Non-American photogra­ phers, who had even less reason to believe in the war, were the first to denounce it. Their heartbreaking photo­ graphs showing the misery of the civilian population and the suffering of the GIs awakened the American con­ science to the arrociry of the war. Photography as a Political Tool

173

Photography and the Law

The history of Robert Dois-­ neau's controversial photo­ graph demonstrates the problems of a photograph's captions and context. De­ scribed by a number of different (and usually in­ accurate) captions, a photo could be used contrary to the photographer's inten­ tions and the subject's wishes. This phorograph was used to portray intem­ perance in one case, prosti­ tution in another-the court held both the magazine and Doisneau's agent respon­ sible for the photograph's abuse; Doisneau was ex­ Olsed as an 'innocent artist.'

In addition to the continual problem of finding work, press photographers are perpetually forced to defend their rights. Reproduction rights to a photograph are protected by law, but these rights vary from country to country and there is no international copyright law that offers automatic protection all over the world. The In­ ternational Copyright Convention, to which sixty-two countries have subscribed since 1971 (the Soviet Union since February 1973), does not attempt to rule on the basic rights of photographers. It simply guarantees a photographer's rights in accordance with the laws of the country where his picture is published. In France, the law of I I March 1957 includes photo­ graphs among creative works and protects them for fifty years after the photographer's death. This copyright term was later extended by eight years (the duration ofthe two

Q

rld wars). In America, photographers cannot claim exclusive

n ts to their photographs unless each print carries the copyright notice: © followed by the name of the author

h)Until recently, the

and the year the picture was take

copyright term was twenty-eight years, beginning with publication and renewable by the author or his heirs for an additional twenty-eight. In September 1976, a new law was passed. Copyright protection for those works created after 1 January 1978 would cover the lifetime of the creator plus fifty years. For works published be­ fore that date, the original renewable period was in­ creased from twenty-eight to forry-seven years. 175

In West Germany the law is different. A photograph, whether published or not, is automatically protected from the moment it was taken for a period of twenty-five years, after which time it falls into the public domain.

If it is published at any time during this twenty-five-year

•

period it is protected for another twenty-five years from •

the date of publication. In Russia, the decree of 21 Februaty 197 3 guarantees the author's rights throughout his lifetime and for twenty·

•

five years after his death. However, government legisla­ tion in any of the federal republics can shorten the dura· tion of the author's rights to photographic works to ten years from the date of publication if a photograph is con­ sidered publicly useful or culturally interesting. In other words, ten years after the first publication, photographs

•

can be used without any payment to the author.

The present situation is chaotic. Even in countries where

•

the photographer's rights are clearly defined by law, these rights are continually ignored. In France, for example,

•

photographs are protected by law against all reproduc­ tion defects or abuses such as unauthorized duplication

•

or resale. In addition, the law expressly provides in Ar­ ticle 6 that the author shall enjoy the right to demand

•

the use of his name. But many newspapers systematically fail to print names along with photographs not taken by

•

'house photographers.' Some offer double pay for un­ signed photographs, which can be reused easily. It is not vanity, however, that leads a photographer to insist that

•

his name be mentioned. The omission opens the door to

•

�

all sorts of copyright infringements production tech­ niques today have become so sophisncated that copies can be made of anything. When the photographer's name

ti

is omitted, the users of the photograph feel no obligation

•

to pay for the author's rights despite the fact that the free-lance photographer's chief source of revenue is the sale of reproduction rights of his pictures:-' Many good journalists, publishers, 1iiid advertising

•

176 Photography & Society

•

people consider the photographer's contribution to their publication negligible in spite of the growing use of pho­

tography to attract the public. The publishers' contempt

for photography can be explained psychologically. Pho­

tographs have lost their prestige as countless amateurs

have begun to snap shutters daily, even though in most cases there is an enormous difference in quality between amateur and professional photography.

Judicial interpretations of the copyright laws have

caused further problems. For example, the question has arisen as to whether the photographic reproduction of a

painting is a creative work. In one case, a photographer

published a reproduction of a masterwork with the per­

mission of the owner, who had bought it at auction.

The reproduction rights were paid to the photographer, but the painter's heirs objected on the grounds that they alone had the rights to the photograph, even though the

picture itself no longer belonged to them. The court de­

cided in their favor, drawing a distinction between re­ production rights and reproduction costs.

r ';ia

A further problem: certain agencies sell photographs u er their own name and collect royalties, although the photographs may have fallen into the public domain

many years before. Under the law, the agencies in this case have rights only to the reproduction costs and an

additional profit margin. As long as publishers, iguorant of the law, agree to pay royalties for photographs in the public domain, unscrupulous agencies will profit from them. .,

MallY legal charges have been brought by those who

have been photographed unawares in the streets or- in such public places as restaurants or theaters. The law

indeed protects one's right to privacy, but in France pub­ lic figures, including statesmen and well-known artists,

cannot refuse to have their pictures published. Who, then, is to decide on the importance of a person? Ob­

viously the judge must give his own interpretation of the

Photography and .he Law

177

law. The photojournalist's work is singularly complicat­ ed by these difficult legal problems. The photographer Robert Doisneau saw one of his photographs used in a different context from his inten­ tion. For him, Parisians had always been the most fasci­ nating of subjects. He loved to wander the streets and stop at cafes. One day, in a small cafe on the rue de Seine where he was accustomed to meeting his friends, he noticed a delightful young woman at the bar drinking a glass of wine. She was seated next to a middle-aged gentleman who was looking at her with a smile that was both amused and greedy. Doisneau asked and received permission to photograph them. The photograph ap­ peared in the magazine

Ie Point,

in an issue devoted to

cafes illustrated with Doisneau's photographs." 5 He handed this photograph, among others, to his agency. All sorts of publications call on agencies when they need pictures to illustrate an article. Sometime later, Doisneau's photograph appeared in a small magazine published by the temperance league to illustrate an article on the evils of alcohol. The gentleman in the photograph, who was a drawing instructor, was not pleased. 'I shall be taken for a boozer; he complained to the apologetic photographer who had no control over how his photo­ graphs were used. Things went from bad to worse when the same photograph appeared in a scandal sheet which had reproduced it from Ie

Point without the permission

of either the agency or the photographer. The caption accompanying the photograph read: 'Prostitution in the Champs-Elysees.' This time the drawing teacher was fu­ rious and sued the magazine, the agency, and the photog­ rapher. The court fined the scandal magazine a large sum of money for fraud, and the agency, which had not re­ leased the photograph, was also found guilty. But the court acquitted the photographer, ruling that he was an 'innocent artist.� The stoty has an epilogue. A well-meaning journalist

178 Photography & Society

who was the Paris correspondent for a newspaper in the south of France published an article recounting the story. He vehemendy accused the photographer of hiding be­ hind curtains to take scandalous shots." · Doisneau does not work this way, but the paparazzi do. Numerous errors are made daily by the press and pub­ lishing houses when they choose photographs for stories they were never intended to illustrate. A German pub­ lisher once asked me for a color photograph of an Indian for the cover of one of his books, without specifying the rype of Indian. I sent him a pictUre of a very beautiful Mexican woman. Imagine my astonishment at later see­ ing this photograph on the cover of a book on India, although I had clearly indicated to the publisher that she was a native Mexican. The following are just a few examples of the many suits between photographers and publishers: A large color photograph of General de Gaulle, published in Paris-Match, had been copied by a designer, reproduced as gold souvenirs and sold in large numbers. The designer admitted to copying, and a penalty was amicably paid to the photographer. Recently, a photographer saw a television program on a children's book, the first page of which carried a painting made from a photograph he had taken. Authorization was required from the photographer for both the painting and its copies. This affair, too, was amicably settled. An influential weekly once purposely neglected to print the name of the photographer under his pictUre illustrating an important article. On 7 April 1967, a small claims court in Paris found against the weekly and ruled that placing the name of the photographer among the names of other photog­ raphers and agencies at the end of the article did not con­ stitute proper identification of the photographer for each picture.

A famous producer bad used some photoreporters' prints in one of his films without their permission and without men-

Photography and the Law

179

tioning the photographets' names. In a judgment tendered on 1 3 December 1968, the court ordered the producer to pay a large sum of money in damages and interest. The ruling pointed out that photographetS, like authots, had the right to recognition for their work, and that their names had to either appear on the photograph or be listed in the credits. In another case, the court ruled that the use of aerial photo­ graphs as posters without mentioning the source or the name of the photographer was an attack on the integrity of his work and the respect due his name.

A photographer filed a complaint against a newspaper that used his photographs without his name and resold them to other publications without authorization and without men­ tion of his name. In a decision on 17 May 1969, a Paris court fined the newspaper, ruling that the newspaper had infringed not only upon the photographer's financial rights, but also upon his moral rights, making it difficult for him to require that his name be mentioned on other reproduc­ tions of his photographs.

In all these cases, the court decided in favor of the

photographers; hut there are countless cases of fraudu­ lent reproduction that are never spotted and never tried. The photojournalist must continually be on the alert in order to prevent infringements of his rights.

, • • • •

•

• 180 Photography & Society

The Scandal-Mongering Press

The growing popularity of scandal magazines in Italy during the fifties led to a new breed of photographers called the paparazzi. Fellini showed them at work in

La Dolce Vita, which criticized an idle and degenerate seg­

ment of Roman society. To pry into people's private lives, the paparazzi use telephoto lenses, which were perfected during the last war to spy on the enemy. The German army used the telephoto lens to film the English coast. Further improvements were made through space science. Scandal sheets exist in all capitalist countries. They are known as the 'rainbow press' in Germany, where they are all the rage. In socialist countries, these maga­ zines are considered immoral and cannot be published. or Noir et Blanc are a few

France Dimancbe, lei-Paris,

of the French scandal sheers that carry love stories and gossip. Photographs are essential for documentation, and such magazines pay dearly for them. The subjects of most of these articles are members of the jet set: movie actresses such as Liz Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, and Zsa Zsa Gabor; playboys; rich businessmen; and even princesses and queens such as Soraya, Margaret, Farah Dibh, or Prince Rainier's wife, Grace Kelly. The paparazzi plant them­ selves in front of the stars' homes day and night, and near the hotels and fashionable night clubs where they have the best chance of surprising their victims. These periodicals feed millions of readers, mostly women, with stories about the love affairs and intimate lives of famous and rich people, allowing them to dream of escaping the 181

mediocrity of their own evetyday existence. Scandal sheets also serve as an outlet for the reader's frustration with life's problems and her envy of those with better luck, for while readers want to daydream about the lives of celebrities, they also want to be privy to every bit of

�j,

otographers who specialize in this kind of reporting

•

subjects. When a photographer is well known in this set,

•

kfen take their photographs with the consent of their

�

he is often apprised of an· event, a meeting, or the ap­ pearance of a celebrity in a partiCUI r

lace by the per­

sons themselves or by their press agen

Suits leading to

trial are rare. The actor Samy Frey, e then husband of Brigitte Bardot, sued lei-Paris for libel as the result of a

•

series of articles and photographs that had been taken against his will. The article accused him of 'destroying' Bardot.'47 In 1971, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis pressed

•

charges against the photographer Ronald E. Galella. He was forced to appear in court, where she hoped to put

•

an end to the pursuit to which she and her children were continually subjected. In a deposition given to the judge,

•

John F. Kennedy, Jr., then eleven years of age, declared that Galella 'dashed at me, jumped in my path, discharged

•

flashbulbs in my face.' Caroline, then fourteen years old, claimed that 'I do not feel safe when he is near.' Galella, for his part, sued Jackie Kennedy and her three secret service agents for $ I . 3 million for preventing him from making a living. 'I don't want to bother them; he told the judge. 'I try to photograph celebrities as they are-in spon­

•

taneous unrehearsed moods. This is what I call my papa­

razzi approach.' 148 The judge decided that in the future Galella had to stay more than 1 5 0 feet from Mrs. Onassis and her children.

•

In 1972, Jackie Kennedy Onassis was once more a vic­ tim of the paparazzi. P/aymen, an Italian erotic magazine, ran fourteen nude photographs of her in one issue that

•

sold 750,000 copies in twenty-four hours. Despite all 182 Photography & Society

•

•

the precautions taken to prevent the

paparazzi

from

approaching Scorpios-an enormous island where the Onassises lived protected by armed guards and a flotilla of motorboats-photographers in skin-diving outfits, using telephoto lenses, had succeeded in surprising Jackie sunbathing in the nude. 'What a beautiful body! What a pretty woman,' exclaimed Madame Tattilo, the editor of after she had decided to print the pictures. Jackie did not even make an attempt to sue this time. The photographs were eventually printed in scandal magazines aU over the world (except in Playboy, which

Playmen,

refused them!). Even magazines like Paris-Match, which do not consider themselves scandal sheets, profited from the occasion. Magazines today are fiUed with pretty nude young women, but to find the former wife of the tragically slain American president among them was enough to shock many and cause a scandal. Under the guise of naturisme, a nudist health move· ment, all sorts of magazines filled with nudes were sold in the thirries. Every newsstand carried them, although vendors never displayed them openly. (In France, the pho­ tographic reproduction of a nude body is punishable by law, if a judge considers it indecent.) With the gradual lifting of sexual taboos in the fifties, however, porno­ graphic magazines sprang up everywhere. Playboy, the most famous of all, was founded in America by Hugh Hefuer, the twenry.seven-year-old son of a preacher. The first issue was undated when it appeared in December 1953, because Hefuer had borrowed $Il,OOO to cover publicarion costs, and had to wait until the first issue was sold out before being able to produce the second. Ioo Hef­ ner introduced the 'Playmate,' a photograph of an enrire­ ly naked young woman. The first of these beauties was Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was Hefuer's prototype of the Playmate; her expansive curves inspired his choice of all those who followed. In 1971, A. C. Spectorsky, the editor-in-chief of Playboy, declared that if all the nude The Scam:L:l1-Mongering Press

r83

girls published during the eighteen years of

Playboy's

existence could be rolled into one, she would weigh 11'1l tons and have a bust of 7,242 inches.'so By the end of 1972,

Playboy had attracted 6.5

million

male readers. Its great success came from playing on sexu­ al conquest and social advancement, the two biggest aspi­ rations of the American middle-class male. By following

Playboy's advice on dress, for instance, one was assured of social success. From the outset, Playboy suggested that its readers' wardrobes include at least seven to ten shirts, 'assuming you wear a clean shirt every day, a practice we recommend.' Again, in the fall of 197 I , readers learned that in fashion 'leather is still king.' 151

)

Sexual problems are treated in the ' Playboy Forum,' a section devoted to an exchange of ideas and advice be­ tween readers and editors based on Playboy 'philosophy.' The exchange is not unlike its counterpart in women's

•

magazines. What kind of man reads Playboy? According to a re­ cent survey, 50 percent of its readers are less than thirty­

•

five years old, with an annual income of more than

•

$ I 5,000, among whom 64 percent are married. The rypical reader is a man who is bored with his domestic

•

life and who has no special interests. Above all, the mag­ azine's attraction lies in the dispariry between its de· scription of life and the lives of its readers, for the life described by Playboy is entirely imaginary. Playboy's

• ,

adverrising is revealing. For the most part, it shows young, handsome, e1egandy dressed young men, photo­ graphed near powerful cars or yachts, generally receiv­ ing admiring glances from pretty girls.

Yes, the world says Yes to Benson & Hedges Gold. Have you already said Yes?

•

•

•

•

This cigarette advertisement is illustrated with a color photograph of a foppish young man in front of a chess 184 Photography & Sodety

•

set (symbol of intelligence) looking at an open package of cigarettes he is holding in his hands. A young girl, leaning on his shoulder, follows his gaze. In January 1973 Playboy carried an ad for a stereo fearuring the intertwined bodies of a young man and woman. The woman's ample chest is well displayed. Playboy's primary attraction is its talk about sex and the abundant illustrations thereof. The issue of January 1973 contained 2.60 pages, 78 of advertising. Among the illustrations, there were 41 pictures of nudes; 1 2. draw· ings and pornographic cartoons; 7 pages of Charles Bragg's erotic drawings illustrating the Apocalypse; nude photographs from the film

The Sense of Life,

'with an

abundance of flesh and fantasy; according to the editors; and finally the famous erotic comic strips. The 4 1 nude photographs included all the monthly Playmates of the previous year. Under eaclJ picture of these naked young girls, there were pictures of them in their 'civvies' with a listing of their names, their jobs, and their hopes for the future. For example: Ellen Mic1Jaels, Miss MarclJ 1972., had received a degree in art from Queensborough College and had temporarily stopped her work, but planned to continue toward her B.A.: 'I'll probably end up teaching; she explained, 'but right now I'm encour­ aged by my progress in modeling here in New York City.' Miss August, Linda Summers, left work in her stepfather's health-food store for a new career as an escrow officer in Chula Vista, California. All the Playmates in Playboy seem to come from respectable families who supposedly find nothing odd about their daughters appearing nude for the delight of millions of men. A true measure of Playboy's respectability lies in the number of famous contributing writers and journalists, who include Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alber­ to Moravia, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others. Even the Roman Catholic ChurclJ uses Playboy to proselytize. Father Joseph Lup of Pikesville, Maryland, a member of

The Scandal-Mongering Press

185

Hugh Hefner capitalized on the lifting of sexual taboos in America in the 1 ';) ;; OS to illustrau hi� ll1agazi�e with photographs of scantily dad \vomcn. He is shown here ,>urrounded by some of the bunny family �\'hich bc.:ame his tr�dema�k and the basis of his multi-million dollar empire.

the Order of the Holy Trinitv, took out a full-page ad in T 9 7 1 at a cost of

S 1 0,000 to recruit young priests '"con­

scious of their social duty.' The effect was 'fantastic and totally unpredicted.' Only twenty years ago, the average American would han been profoundly shocked bv a magazine like PL,y­ boy. In today's 'plastic society; Hugh Hefner, along with \Xtalt Disney, is considered one of the 't".o great puritan entrepreneurs of culture in the twentieth century,' 152 and Playboy is ranked high among other WASP-style maga­ zines. 'How has Hefner managed to rank next to Disney?' asked the very serious Protestant magazine Christian Century in dismay.15J Hugh Hefner took over 'those things that the puritan had ah�.'ays imagined joy to be, yet had repressed, and embraced them as healthy and valuable, and advertised them as freedom and self­ expression.' In the past, you could feel guilty for just having sex; today, thanks to Hefner, you feel guilty if you don't. Disney and Hefner represent a closed and guiltless \\'orld, controlled by a mechanical and simplistic imagination.154 Playboy Inc has founded many businesses, clubs, ho­ tels, and a publishing house. The corporation has invest­ ed in a record company. financed films, and launched European editions of the magazine. Other magazines copying its formula have already appeared. England's Penthouse has been printing an American edition since 1 9 7 T ; Italy has Playmen; and France Lui. In 1 9 7 1 ,

eighteen years after the appearance o f Playboy, Hefner offered one million shares of stock at $24 each, keeping seven million shares for himself. Wtth a fortune estimated at around $ I 64 million,ls5 Hefner is today among the half-dozen American multimillionaires who o\ve their success only to themselves. In the mid-seventies, however, Playboy Inc.'s profits registered a loss of almost 5 0 percent, the first loss since Playboy was founded. In an article printed by Time in The Sc,mdJI-.\fongering Press

187

August 1 9 7 5 , it was noted that the men's magazine had had to reduce its subscription base, which reached its peak at 7 million in 1 9 72, to 5.8 million. This represents the largest loss of subscribers ever registered in all of magazine history. The decline is explained not only by the economic crisis, but also, ironically by the success of the sexual revolution for which Playboy fought so hard. Once extremely provocative, Playboy seems curiously old-fashioned today, in comparison with its competitors. In 1 94 6 there was much publicity about the stoty of an American soldier who had killed a prostitute in Paris after spending a night with her. Psychiatrists claimed that the young American, brought up in his country's puri­ tanical tradition. had killed the woman to free himself from his feelings of guilt. A few years later, Hefner's genius sensed the end of sexual taboos in America. Pho­

The uneven acceptance of sexual freedom is high­ lighted by photographs. In America, bare-chesred bun­ nies have appeared in large centerfold photographs

since 19 'i " while in France the picnir�e of a man's ex­ posed derriere caused a ruckus in 1972. If the pic­ ture had been drawn rather than photographed, there might have been less opposi­ tion, but since it appeared in a country where a photo­ graphed nude could be deemed indecent by the court and punishable by law, the artist, his agent. and his record company were fined for the poster.

tography struck him as the perfect means of manipulat­ ing and satisfying the erotic desires of his contemporaries, while at the same time projecting himself as the great moralizer of his day. The liberation from sexual taboos has not taken on the same explosive form in France that it has in the Anglo­ Saxon and Nordic countries, dominated for centuries by repressive Protestantism. The French have a reputation as lovers, and sex has never been considered sinful in France. On the other hand, bourgeois morality is strictly defended by French law. The public display of a photo· graph showing a nude backside can cost dearly as the pop singer Michel Polnareff found out. In 1 9 7 2 Polnareff was scheduled to gi\'e a concert at the Olympia, the largest music hall in Paris. \'V'ith his publicity agent, he dreamed up a photographic poster of himself \....ith sunglasses, \\learing a \\'oman's broad­ brimmed hat and a lace shirt descending to just about his nude buttocks. Six thousand of these posters were plastered on the walls of Paris. Half of Paris laughed ".;hile the other half was indignant. Henri Lariviere, a 188

Phutogr..Jphy

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Society

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professional poster-hanger, undoubtedly outraged by the singer's backside, had it covered with a white square, imitating the French television signal which warns par­ ents that films have been judged harmful for youngsters. Polnareff was brought before a judge and accused of exhibiting an obscene poster. The following excerpt from the dialogne between the judge and the singer is worthy of Courteline, the French comic writer of the early twen­ tieth century. JUDGE:

So you wanted to score a publicity hit and shock the bon bourgeois?

POLNAREFF:

Not at all. It was simply a joke. I just want­ ed to make people laugh. There's too much moroseness [a word used by former Premier Jacques Chahan-Delmas to descrihe the current atmosphere in France] in this country.

JUDGE:

In sum� you're out to provide a remedy for

everything that has gone wrong in France. POLNAREFF:

Why not? The image of my country

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shouldn't be limited to the fountains of Versailles and Camembert cheese. JUDGE:

D o you think o f yourself a s an historical monument?

POLNAREFF:

France's glories are not only in the past.

J U D G E:

Your poster is indecent.

P O LNAREFF:

I didn't think so.

JUDGE:

That's because you can't see yourself.

After two weeks of deliberation, the judge fined the singer 60,000 francs (10 francs for each poster), the record com­ pany 60,000 francs, and his press agent, who had sup­ ported the scheme with 30,000 francs, a sum total of 1 50,000 francs ($30,000) for having posted a completely 190 Photography & Society

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nude rear end on the walls of Paris. Today, this poster has become a collector's item. What scandalized the judge and many Parisians was the fact that it was a photograph. A drawing would have undoubtedly gotten by more easily, but the basic realism of the photograph (the singer's buttocks were much whit­ er than his tanned legs) had made this advettising mes­ sage too aggressive.

The Scandal-Mongering Press

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Photography as Art

Claims that photography is art are made for a number of different techniques, from the simple, early compo­ sitions of Stieglitz to the photocollages of John Heartfield, from the use of photographic processes without a camera to the unedited recording of some­ thing which could be con­ sidered artistic in itself, such as Brassai's picture of graffiti (1945).

Today, there are tens of thousands of professional pho­ tographers, some of whose works are of outstanding doc­ umentary value, artistic quality, and imagination. Two major groups have emerged from among these photogra­ phers: the 'concerned' photographers, for whom photog­ raphy is a way of expressing their involvement with socIal issues; and those who have chosen photography as a medium of personal artistic expression. In both cases, they can be creators or simple craftsmen, but all are de­ scendants of those who, after its half-century of stagna­ tion, had revitalized the prestige of the photographic medium. These predecessors were intimately involved in the artistic and political movements of the twenties. The tremendous upheaval in Europe and America fol­ lowing the First World War gave birth to many often contradictory movements that influenced artistic trends of the period. In America, writers such as Dreiser, Sin­ clair, Hemingway, and Steinbeck, pushed toward an aggressive, almost documentary realism that would re­ flect their personal crises in confronting the brutaliry of American life. They were often reproached for their 'photographic' sryle. In Russia, the films of Eisenstein and Pudovkine were charting a new course for the art of the cinema. Russian writers of the twenties described Soviet life and glorified the revolutionary epic. For the first time, enormously enlarged photographs were dis­ tributed to fix the leaders' images in the minds of the people forever. In France, the surrealist movement linked 19 3

real facts of daily life to unconscious motives. Man Ray made photographs without a camera using the primitive technique of assembling objects on a piece of sensitized paper and then exposing them to light. Rediscovering the process by chance, be named these photograms after himself, calling them rayographs. Influenced by surrealist theory, he thought of them as a kind of automatic writing, the result of the chance placement of objects." o

�I

Several years earlier, Christian Chad had been experi­ menting with the same technique in Germany.

I'

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When photographs began to appear in newspapers at the beginning ofthe century, people clipped them out and pasted them in albums. In this purely mechanical juxta­ position of images, the photograph's meaning was not changed. Later, the Dadaists of the twenties made col­ lages by assembling pieces of clipped photographs and drawings. They used photographic images out of context as a way of attacking conventional art. In photomon­ tage, on the other hand, the photograph retains all of irs significance. The form was created by John Heart­ field, who was born in Germany in 1891. During the First World War he was an avowed pacifist who, in pro­ test of official propaganda against the English, decided to Anglicize his name by changing it from Helmut Herz­ feld to John Heartfield. He became a friend of George Grosz, the painter whose aggressive drawings criticized bourgeois society. Together they created collages, first against the war and then against the Weimar Republic which had crushed the November Revolution of 1 91 8 . After 1920, Heartfield used photography exclusively to unmask the reactionary character of the ruling class. He began making photomontages and called himself a mon­

teur, partly

to suggest his editorial function, partly after the German mechanics and electricians who wore clothes called

Monteuranzuge.

Using carefully chosen photo­

graphs, without changing the significance of any, he jux­ taposed them on a single backing to create a new collec-

194 Photography & Society

Man Ray (1880-1974) cre­ ated photographs (or what hecalledrayographs) by rna· nipnlatinglight, objects, and light-sensitive paper. His conception ofthe camera­ less process-'automatic writing"-contrasted with I...aszl6 Moboly-Nagy's ap­ proach of calrulated exper­ iments (see pages I96-I97), although both used the same materials (Man Ray, Rayograph, 19")'

,

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tive meaning for the whole. John Heartfield joined the rank� of the extreme left, and his photomontag� ap­ peared in the illustrated communist weekly A.I.Z., on book covers from the Berlin publishing house of Malik, and on posters around the country. Their impact lies in the simplicity of their composition, which makes his ideas accessible to everyone. In his hands, photography became a formidable weapon in the class struggle.'57

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the great photographic theoreti­ cian, was the first to understand the new creative possibil­ ities photography had opened up. In his 1925 Bauhaus John Heartfield used pho­ tography in an unconven­ tional way to make political commentaries. The constit­ uent photographs of his photomontages retained in­ dividual significance while suggesting ironies and criti­ cism by their juxtaposition (John Heartfield, Untitled rotogravure, I 93 6).

publication,

Painting, Photography, Film, he prophesied

the future ofphotography and contemporary art.'5. More than thirty years before his time he defined artistic move­ ments that only began to develop in the second half of the twentieth century. His early ideas on the role of photog­ raphy, based on practical expetience, were later confirmed by the philosopher Walter Benjamin in his significant �say, 'The Work of Art during the Age of Technical Re­ production; '59 and his Short History ofPhotography. Born in Hungary in 1895, Moholy-Nazy studied law, but soon left school to devote himself entirely to paint­ ing. He joined the Hungatian avant-garde artistic move­ ment Ma ('Today'), whose goals were similar to the French

esprit nouveau

('New Spirit') through which Le

Corbusier and Ozenfant explored the interdependence of painting, sculpture, and modem industrial technology. In 1920 Moholy arrived in Berlin and joined the Dada movement. It was during this period that, unfamiliar with the work of Chad or Man Ray, he too created pho­ tograms without a camera. For Man Ray, they were sort of automatic writing, as I've noted; but for Moholy the composition of photograms was a carefully thought-out process, with each effect calculated and nothing left to chance. He aimed at specific forms and tonalities, moving from white to black, while touching upon the entire spec­ trum of intermediary grays. In 1922 his first exhibition

Photography as Art

195

of abstract paintings and photograms was held in Der Sturm, the avant-garde gallery in Berlin. Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, visited the exhibition and invited Moholy to teach at his state school in Weimar. Moholy accepted and in the spring of 1923 he joined an illustrious teaching staff that included Paul Klee, Jo­ hannes Inen, and Oskar Schlemmer. His ideas became pan of the Bauhaus spirit and ultimately had a decisive influence on modem art. Moholy was a painter, sculptor, film maker, and pho­ tographer with a particular interest in the prol'llems of light and color. He made experimental films, the most famous of which is significantly titled Light-play, black­ white-gray. In 1 9 3 3 , after the Nazis came to power, he emigrated to Amsterdam, then to London, where he con­ tinued his experiments with color film and produced posters and documentary films. He also began to experi­ ment with Plexiglas in his three-dimensional paintings, which he called 'space modulators.' From 1937 on, as director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, he had a con­ siderable influence on the American artistic scene. He constructed mobiles and other kinetic sculptures and continued ro spend a large part of his time on light ex­ periments. He died of leukemia in Chicago at the age of fifty-one in 1946. After a century of debate over the artistic value of photography, Moholy put the question in its proper per­ c;- spective. 'The old quarrel between anists and photogra­ , phers concerning whether photography is an an is a false problem. It is not a question of replacing painting with photography, but of clarifying the relations between pho­ tography and contemporary painting, and showing that the development of technology out of the industrial rev­ olution has materially contributed to the rise of new forms of optic creation.' 160 Until MohoIy's time, inter­ pretations of photography had been influenced by aes­ thetic and philosophical ideas relating to painting. Now I96 Photography & Society

,i

Mohaly-Nagy experi­ mented with cameraless photography at the same time as but independently of Man Ray. There was noth­ ing automatic about Moholy-Nagy's light plays, which were carefully calcu­ lated to reproduce the many gradations of light and shadow possible with three­ dimensional objects (above:

Self-portrait photogram, profile, 1922; opposite: Photogram, 192.2).

•

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it was time to recognize the special laws of photography. Light in itself must be considered a creator of forms, and photography and film must be judged from this new point of view. Photography opens up new perspectives.

It can freeze fleeting light and shadow on a piece of paper, even without the use of intervening equipment. It can reveal the beauty of the negative image.

In his 1938 book New Vision, Moholy explained his theoty of light gradation and his discovety of new angles and perspective which corresponded to modem machine technology. Photography is subject to its own laws, in­ dependent of the opinions of art critics. These laws will be the only valid measurement of its future value. What is important is our participation in new experiences of space. Thanks to photography, mankind has acquired the power to view his surroundings with new eyes. A photograph's value cannot be measured from an aesthetic point of view alone; it must also be judged by the human and social intensity of its visual representation. The pho­ tograph is not simply a means of discovering reality, be­ cause nature seen through the camera is different from nature seen with the human eye. The camera influences our way of seeing and creates a 'new vision.' 161

Moholy's ideas have greatly influenced social theorists, notably Marshall Mcluhan, as well as two generations of photographers, many of whom do not even know his name. Just as Freud's discoveries have molded our habits of judging certain human reacrions-the idea of a 'Freudi­ an slip' seems natural to us today-so the ideas ofMoholy­ Nagy have become inseparable from our way of seeing. To his contemporaries in 1925 his 'new vision' seemed a utopia, but today we are familiar with his vocabulaty and ideas as they have been realized in contemporaty art. Photography's place among the graphic arts is no long­ er in dispute. Moholy has rightfully shown that it has its own aesthetic. Its artistic decline toward the end of the last centuty resulted from an error of judgment on 198

Photography & Society

the part of those photographetS who wanted to imitate painting. Today there are movements in painting that use tech­ nical processes borrowed from photography. It is no longer a matter of sticking a photograph in the middle of a painting, as the cubists and surrealists had done, but one of painting with the eyes of a camera. It is not surprising then that the public which crowds into the exhibitions of the photorealists takes them for copies of photographs. (This school has little do to with those conceptual artists who also use photographs as a means of expression, but with very different techniques and intentions.) PaintetS have used photographs as documents since the camera was invented, but for the first time we see paintetS plagiatizing the photograph. It might even be asserted that, thanks to this .school of painting which be­ gan with the photo realists, photography itself has found greater prominence. A certain distance in time is always needed to pick out the superior talents among the multitude of artists in each generation. It took at least thirty yeats for the great photographetS of the twenties and thirties to gain recognition as the mastetS of visual exploration they were. Thanks to their talent, photography has been revived as a valid means of artistic expression. Some had back­ grounds in photojournalism, others in a movement called 'The New Objectivity,' but each had a different way of interpreting the environment, colored by their own ex­ periences. The majority of them, living in a Europe which was tom apart by social crimes, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War, found their subjects in the street. For the Americans, who had suffered in their own way during the Depression, a more introspective vision seemed more valid. Today we realize that this generation gave us the pi­ oneetS of modem photography. Late in the sixties, a new

Photography as Art

199

generation of photographers began searching for a dif­ ferent means of photographic expression. They experi­ mented with sequences and the juxtaposition of images in an effort to evoke personal memories and extremely intimate views of the problems of contemporary society. The photograph will always remain a document, but the interests of this 'New Wave' point out photography's vitality. Despite the myriad masterpieces of the past centuries, contemporary painters remain undaunted, and rightfully dream of creating new forms. Similarly, thousands of professional photographers aspire to new directions. To­ day photography is entering the museums with the ap­ proval of those whose profession it is to preserve art. On their walls, photography has recaptured the artistic aura that it once possessed. By contrast, certainly what most gives photography its special relevance today is that it continues to provide a means of expression for mil­ lions of amateurs.

200 Photography & Society

Amateur Photography

Amateur photography has been in existence since the invention of the camera, but it was only in 1888, with George Eastman's introduction of the first Kodak, that amateurism made headway. Priced at $25, the Kodak was loaded with a roll of 100 exposures. Once the film was exposed, the unopened camera was to be sent to the Rochester factory, where the film was developed and printed, the camera reloaded and the lot returned to the sender, all for $10.'62 Many amateur models have appeared both in America and Europe since then. During the last few years, cameras and film have undergone revo­ lutionary improvements, but Kodak was the first to ex­ ploit the mass-market potential. Several decades ago traveling was the privilege of the well-to-do. Today, thanks to leisure time, paid vacations, and improved methods of transportation, millions of people travel each year. For the affluent society, auto­ mobiles and airplanes are no longer a luxury. In 1972, many millions of tourists traveled around the world, invading famous capitals, exotic sites, beach­ es, forests, and mountains. �Twenty countries in twenty days,' advertised a large tourist agency selling package tours. Like migrating birds, tourists travel in groups. During the summer months they are everywhere, sprint­ ing around historical monuments while long lines of buses wait for them. Modem tourists speak in many lan­ guages and do not know each other, but they all have in common the cameras hanging from their necks. 201

Everything is preplanned on organized tours. The bus stops at places chosen ahead of time, spots where photo­ graphs should be taken, such as Notre-Dame in Paris, the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and the pyramids in Egypt. The next day will bring other monuments, other sites, other countries. The tourists have just enough time to get out of the bus and snap the shutter. They be­ come passive objects transported from place to place. If the human mind has limitations and cannot absorb so many new impressions in so short a time without confus­ ing them, no matter. Once home, the photographs will 202

Photography & Society

Certainly no amateur, Henri Cartier-Bresson cleverly linked amateur photography to tourism in this picture. Tourists, like many amateur photog­ raphers, used the camera primarily to capture and preserve memories rather than for artistic or com­ mercial purposes.

be developed and the visits will be remembered. There is no need to look-the camera sees for you. Today the photographic industry flourishes for legions of amateurs. Its rate of development is among the fast­ est in the world. According to the ' 974/75 Wolfman Report on the photographic industry, American amateurs took over 6 billion pictures that year, 87 percent in color. In 1974, total world revenues for the industry were esti­ mated at $ 5 .7 billion. Americans make up 42 percent of the world market, and each American family spent $ , 5 on photographic products for the year. Among seventeen leisure activities, photography ranked fourth, after listen­ ing to the stereo, fishing, and camping. In France, there were 10.3 million cameras in use in 1974. That means close to one out of every two French adults is a photographer. Photography has become a popular hobby today. We can predict that this infatua­ tion Vvrith the camera will grow in years to come, and by 1980 an estimated 300 million tourists will be traveling around the world taking pictures. Large companies in the photographic industry are expanding their research to satisfy the growing demand which will, of course, lead to higher profits. During the last decade, in fact, technology has made spectacular progress. In '963 Kodak brought out their new 'lnstamatic' line of cameras. The majority of ama­ teurs, for whom photography is little more than a means of keeping pictorial souvenirs of family members, friends, and travels, enthusiastically adopted these inexpensive, easy-to-operate cameras. Between 1963 and 1972, close to 60 million Instamaties were sold throughout the world. Amateurs prefer them to the more sophisticated and ex­ pensive German and Japanese models. In 1971 only one million Japanese cameras were sold in the United States, a figure representing just 10 percent of the total sale in America. German cameras are more expensive and sell even less readily. Amateur Photography

203

In 1972 Kodak took another giant step by introducing a new line of Instamatics small enough to carry in one's pocket like a wallet or a package of cigarettes. Calling it 'a revolutionary change,' Time magazine declared:

t

'The era of pocket photography is here. . . . '63 The model will meet the new needs of those amateurs who travel more and more with less and less baggage.'

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The pocket camera is nothing new. Minox, another pocket camera, has been manufactured in Germany for many years. But the tiny film used in the Minox was incapable of producing first-class prints. Above all, there was no color film available for the reduced size. Kodak researchers developed a film for the pocket camera that could produce as good a color print as any made from larger format film. In 1 974, 87 percent of the film bought by amateurs was for color impressions. Within the fore­

> >

seeable future, color may replace black-and-white film entirely. Color film for amateurs is a recent development. In the mid-1930S Kodak introduced Kodachrome and Agfa Ag­ facolor. Few amateurs used either because the film, in addition to being much more expensive than black and white, generally produced slides requiring the use of a

> > >

projector.· Color reproductions on paper were tremen­ dously expensive. With few exceptions, professionals in Europe did not use color either because most magazines were not yet equipped for color printing. It was only after World War II, toward the end of the forties, that European magazines began to print color pages regular­ ly, thereby stimulating the public's interest in color pho­ tography. In 1949 in America, and in 1952 in France, Kodak introduced Kodacolor, a color negative film from which good prints could be made inexpensively. From then on, color photography took off. The pocket Instamatic weighs only 3 ounces. Because its film is 3 0 percent smaller than that used in ordinary Instamatics, it requires 30 percent less manufacturing 204 Photography & Society

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material. By selling the new film for the same price, Kodak dears a profit of an additional 30 percent on each roll sold. Wonderful business! The New York Stock Ex­ change's response, the barometer of American industrial enterprises, was volatile. During the first months of 1972., following the announcement of the pocket camera, East­ man Kodak shares rose 4 1 .5 points to $ 1 1 3 - 5 I n 1972. Kodak was the sole manufacturer of the new

i

machines for developing and making pr nts from the pocket camera. The new projectors for amateurs who preferred to make color slides from their Instamatic neg· atives were also made by Kodak. In 1 974, Kodak could declare a net profit of $62.9,519,000 afrer taxes. Despite inflation, operating costs, the shortage of certain materi­ als, the energy crisis, the company's products et!joy re­ markable success. One of the company's ambitions is to open up the Chinese market. Perhaps the time is not far off whet! 800 million Chinese will be brandishing pock­ et Instamatics instead of the Little Red Book. Kodak, the largest manufacturer of film in the United States, derives 80 percent of its profits from the sale of film, but it is not the only colossus of the photographic in­ dustry. Polaroid is another American giant. Three months afrer Kodak's heavily advertised an­ nouncement of its new pocket Instamatic, Polaroid cre­ ated a sensation by introducing its own pocket camera, the SX-70. Larger and heavier than the Instamatic, the SX-70 is nevertheless capable of developing and produc­ ing a finished print in just a few seconds. This miraculous camera was invented by the scientist Edwin Robert Land. Born in Bridgeport, Connecricut, in 1 909, Land studied physics and originally made a name for himself during a colloquium at Harvard in 1933, where he presented a new theory based on his experiments in light polariza­ tion. His scientific work, induding penetrating studies on color, is highly valued and has earned him honorary degrees from eleven universities and countless distinc-

Amateu, Photography 2.05

tions from all over the world. His research experiments in light polarization with new materials led to the con­ struction of a new camera to which he gave the name Polaroid. As to how Land conceived of constructing such a camera, in an article dated 26 June 1972,

Time maga­

zine gave this explanation: 'While vacationing in Santa Fe with his family in 194 3, Land had his three-year-old daughter Jennifer pose for some pictUIes. The child asked how long it would be before she could see them. Land, who had been interested in photography since childhood, immediately began wondering how photos might be de­ veloped and printed right inside the camera. He now claims jokingly that by the time he and Jennifer returned from their walk, he had solved all the problems "except for the ones that it has taken from 1943 to 1972 to solve.'"

In 1947 Land demonstrated his invention before a group of incredulous scientists. The first Polaroid was put on sale in America the following year. Weighing four­ and-a-half pounds and priced at $90, the new camera

•

printed sepia pictures. The principle involved placing an exposed negative in contact with a sensitized paper and then passing the two sheets together through a pair of

•

rollers. The sheets emerged from the camera in a few minutes. Nothing remained but to separate the papers

•

and spread a small amount of liquid on the finished print to fix it.

In 1950, Land added an automatic device for setting exposure time, and in 1963 he offered color film. The latest of the Polatoid cameras, the SX-70, is based on an entirely new process. Land invested hundreds of mil­ lions of dollars in the project and built new factories for mass producing the new camera. Its novelty lies in the automatic development of the image right under the pho­ tographer's eyes without leaving any waste. (For our af­ fluent society with its agonizing waste disposal problems,

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this was an important consideration.) The latest Polaroid achievement was made public in 1978. It is a camera 206

Photography & Society

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that does not even have to be forused. To detennine the distance of obj ects from the camera, it uses a system of ultrasonic sound. The company is ranked among the fast­ est growing industries in the United States. Polaroid stock purchased in 1938 for $1,000 would be worth $3.6 million today. '64 At present, Kodak and Polaroid, the two rival giants of the American photographic industry, jointly face even more dangerous competition from Japanese camera manufacturers. Since the end of the Second World War, Japan has devoted itself wholeheartedly to the photo­ graphic and motion picture markets. In less than fifreen years, the Japanese have succeeded in becoming the world's largest manufacturers in these areas, just as they have excelled in the manufacture of electron microscopes, sewing machines, and motorcycles. In 1972 there were over a hundred Japanese companies specializing in the production of cameras and equipment. Between 1966 and 1970, camera production alone had risen from 3.3 to 5.8 million. Fiiry-six percent of total production is exported, mostly to North America, followed by Europe. Supported by funds from large Japanese firms and with the help of computers, thousands of techuical specialists are devoted to perfecting complicated zoom and auto­ matic focusing lenses. In order to remain competitive in their pricing, they are obliged constantly to improve their products. The Japanese compauies, like those in America and Europe, are merging, creating enormous industrial complexes as the larger firms absorb the smaller. As labor has become increasingly expensive, manufacturers have begun to set up new factories abroad where labor is less expensive, for example in Singapore and Hong Kong. Japanese compauies are still offering unbeatable prices at present, but the specter of Chinese competition is al­ ready looming on the horizon. Just as the Japanese start­ ed out in the photographic industry by copying German cameras, the Chinese are now copying Japanese cameras.

Amateur Photography

2.07

In 1972, Seagull, a Chinese manufacturer, developed an exact copy of the Minolta SRT-101 that sold at a price that undercut all competition_ Japanese amateur photographers are legion_ Unlike Western amateurs, they buy the most sophisticated cam­ eras because they are cheap in Japan, within everyone's price range_ Eleven Japanese periodicals are devoted to photography, and 10,000 photographers graduate each

year from Japanese schools. l•s

Cameras constructed with the help of electronic equip­ ment are becoming increasingly sophisticated inside. Yet, even a child can quickly learn to use them, since all set­ tings are automatically self-regulating. From the techni­ cal point of view, no one can ruin a picture. This explains in part the tremendous public interest in photography. The growing monotony of everyday life is another factor. Lives have become regimented, dominated by a techno­ structure that allows less and less initiative. In the days

•

of the craftsman, a man could still find satisfaction in expressing his personality and his hopes in his work. To­ day he is reduced to little more than a cog in one wheel of an increasingly mechanized society. Photography has attracted so many enthusiasts in part because it gives them the illusion of being creative. Numerous amateur clubs and photography magazines exist all over the world.

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lime-Life recently published a series of lavishly illustrat­ ed books on photographic subjects, which was translated into several languages and sold throughout the world by

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the millions .Finally, the massive advertising campaigns by the photographic industry have contributed significantly

•

to the increased number of amateur photographers. America is the most advanced technological society in the world. It was in America, toward the end of the fifties, that a movement began which made headway among the more sophisticated amateur photographers. They began to buy up the most complex cameras, the Leica, Nikon F, even Hasselblad and Linhof. GIs return208

Photography & Society

I

ing from Vietnam brought back inexpensive Japanese cameras. Attics, garages, and bathrooms were refur­ bished as darkrooms and filled with expensive equip­ ment. Galleries devoted entirely to photography have opened in all important American cities. In 1977 there were forty-eight galleries in New York alone that or­ ganized exhibitions or sold photographs to the public. Until recently, collectors have been exclusively interested in the works of nineteenth-century photographers. Now a growing number of collectors are also drawn to con­ temporary photographs. Artworks are selling at such high prices that young people in patticular do not have the means to purchase them. The price of a photograph, on the other hand, is rarely more than an original litho­ graph. Columns on photography have begun to appear in most important newspapers, and the New York Times publishes an entire page on photographic exhibits and galleries every Sunday. Since the spring of 1975, criticism on photographic exhibitions has appeared in the Times art column, thereby publicly consecrating photography's place among the graphic arts. Besides the specialized magazines that appear every month, articles on photog­ raphy and its importance as an art appear in such maga­ zines as the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, and the New

York Review of Books. Even the very serious Wall Street Journal, which deals with finance, carries some articles on photography. Moreover, speculation in photographs has caught on with financial advisors, who encourage their clients to buy photographs as investments. In 1975, there were more than 400 photographic ex­ hibitions across the country. Public sales of photographic collections are held at the prestigious Parke-Bernet Gal­ lery in New York, the Hotel Drouot and the Palais Gal­ liera in Paris, at Sotheby's and Chtistie's in London, and at the important auctions in Cologne, Germany. As with sales of paintings and rare books, catalogs are prepared.

In 197 l one sale brought receipts of more than $ 3 milAmateur Photography

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lion. At a sale in February 1 9 7 5 where twentieth-century photographs were being sold for the first time, Alfred Stieglitz's photogravure 'The Steerage; which he con­ sidered his best picture, sold for $4,500. His magazine Camera Work ( 1 903 - 1 9 I 7) , in fifty volumes (incom­ plete), went for $24,000. The photographs of Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Brassai, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White were among those that sold for high prices, sometimes more than $ I ,000 for an original print. Important photographic collections exist in many American museums. At the Museum of Modem Art in New York, a department devoted to photographic his­ tory organizes exhibitions of contemporary work. Other American museums have followed their example. The International Museum of Photography in Rochester, housed in the large private mansion previously owned by George Eastman, is devoted solely to photography. In the fall of ' 974, all the newspapers carried long arti­ cles on Cornell Capa's International Center of Photogra­ phy (I.c.P.), the first museum in New York City devoted entirely to photography. Since the beginning of the seven­ ties, annual symposiums have taken place in the United States and Europe for curators, critics, and photographic specialists to study methods of collecting and classifying photographs as well as many other issues concerning the medium. The importance accorded to photography in the United States is reflected in the schools. Today an estimated 80,000 students study the subject in 6 7 5 schools, col­ leges, and other institutions, 177 university programs among them. It is a field in which diplomas range from simple certificates to the highest university degrees. In ' 9 7 ' New York University offered the first doctoral de­ gree in photography. Other signs of photography's public success are the hundreds of books published each year and the popularity of photographic posters. A few publishers specialize in 210

Photography & Society

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Following the lead of John Szarkowski, director of the Photography Depanment of the Museum of Modern An, the directors of many museums began to recog­ nize photography as an an form wonhy of special at­ tention. The George East­ man House's International Museum of Photography has one of the richest early photographic collections in existence.

limited edition portfolios of lavishly displayed original prints, most including some dozen photographs, with prices varying from a few hundred to six thousand dol­ lars. These limited editions generally consist of thirty to sixty signed and numbered prints. More than ten years after the photography boom start­ ed in America, European interest is beginning to extend beyond a limited group of professionals. As in America, the growing number of amateur photographers has trig­ gered the change. Specialized galleries have opened in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, Milan, Basel, and Amster­ dam. Publishers who had been hostile to the idea of pho­ tographic books because of previous disappointments are changing their minds. Gallety collections devoted en­ tirely to photography are beginning to appear. In 1978, Amateur Photography

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the French government established a National Founda­ tion in Lyons to promote the photographic medium as a fine art. Since the late sixties European museums have been exhibiting photography regularly. The Photokina is the most important fair in the pho­ tographic industry. Begun in '950, it is held every other year in Cologne, Germany. In September 1978 it reached gigantic proportions. 'Arriving by car, train, bus, charter plane, the visitors were so numerous that it was impos­ sible to find hotel accommodations in Cologne without reservations made months in advance. Thousands of visi­ tors had to sleep in neighboring cities while others camped in trucks along the Rhine. What a- success!' wrote a cor­ respondent for a French newspaper who felt lost in the immensity of the exhibition. With so many countries rep2I2

Photography & Society

Fonner director and curator of George Eastman House's photography collection, Beaumont Newhall (left) is shown here reviewing pho­ tographs with professional photographer Yosef Karsh (right) at George Eastman House.

resented, it was a Tower of Babel. He continued, 'Pho­ tography and film making no longer remain the domain of artists and professionals. Everything is so easy that the consumer quickly uses up dozens of feet of film without realizing it. It is an expensive habit, very profitable for the manufacturers.' In former years, many exhibitors had unfortunate experiences. Their stands were stormed by crowds of amateur enthusiasts who came just to look, and who scared off serious buyers. The Photokina's or­ ganization had to be changed. Since 1974 cultural events and the many exhibitions of photographs have taken place outside the commercial fairgrounds, attracting many thousands more visitors than the industrial exhibi­ tions themselves.

AmateuT Photography

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Conclusion

Photography and society: Marc Riboud's camera re­ corded a panoramic sea of faces that even D. O. Hill would not have envisioned. Both understood, however, the camera's potential to document and at times in­ fluence the social, political, and cultural environment in which they lived.

During the Renaissance it was said of a cultivated per­ son that he had 'a good nose.' Today we say that he has 'vision; for sight is now the sense most often called upon. A picture is easy to understand and accessible to every­ one. Its most special characteristic is its immediate emo­ tional effect. It leaves little time for reflection or for the reasoning a conversation or the reading of a book re­ quires. This immediacy is both its strength and its danger. Thanks to photography, the number of images the aver­ age individual confronts has been multiplied a million­ fold. The world is no longer evoked. It is directly rep­ resented_ The Vietnam War was sadly symbolized by a photo­ graph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a small girl of nine, severely burned by a napalm attack, fleeing with other children on a South Vietnamese road. It was printed all over the world, eliciting horror and hatred for war in a fashion infinitely more powerful than dozens of pages written on the subject would have been. lbe photograph's effect was so immediate that it was reproduced in the 29 December 1972 issue of Life among the most memorable photographs of the year. To cushion the emotional shock, Life printed a color portrait of the little Vietnamese girl smiling along with it, with the explanation that Kim Phuc had been in a Saigon hospital for fifteen weeks receiving skin transplants and physical therapy. 'But the war was not done yet with the little girl,' reported Life. 'Incredibly. South Vietnamese planes struck again in November, this 215

time demolishing Kim Phuc's home . . . [the napalm attack was also the result of an error on the army's part]. Kim Phuc returned again to her home, which has now been partially rebuilt. Her scars are healed, and she is going to school again. Her memories lie hidden behind an easy, cheerful smile.' Despite the reassuring photograph, the picrure of Phan Thi Kim Phuc tearing off her burning clothes and runuing naked on the road will remain for­ ever engraved in the memories of all who have seen it. c:::-Photography's tremendous power of persuasion in ad­ dressing the emotions is consciously exploited by those who use it as a means of manipulation n his book Con­

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fessions ofan Advertising Man, Davi