THIS BOOK is much more than the sum of its parts. A history of photography might seem a simple task given that the illustrations are going to be culled, by default, from great masters of the art. And when dealing with these great names of history, familiar and oft loved pictures are hard to avoid. For example, who cannot discuss Alfred Eisenstaedt without using his unique grab shot of Josef Goebbels in 1933? - a fleeting second, when the Nazi propaganda chief appears to reveal all his innermost torment and malevolence. But Marien also discusses the accusation that Eisenstaedt's much loved picture, of a soldier kissing a nurse in Times Square on VJ day, was a staged production. These little details compound to make this work a major treatise on the photographic art.
Eight chapters cover a period of forty years, examining multifaceted aspects of the camera image from travel to science, war to fashion and the mass media. Within these conceptual parameters are secondary debates on ideas, morality, politics, advertising, domesticity et al. This revised edition also extends its concerns beyond the American and European criterion and incorporates more unusual images from Russia, Latin America, India, Africa, Japan and China. Inevitably, the major names of photography are present, but Marien has taken the opportunity to include some emerging talents, amongst them: Edward Burtynsky, Thomas Struth and Andreas Serrano.
Perhaps, surprisingly, one of the most fascinating chapters in this history is the first one, when Marien tracks the evolution of artists' visual aids - through the silhouette machine, the pantograph, camera obscura, camera lucida and other optical gimmicks used by painters - to the first magic moments of fixing an image by photographie methods (from the Greek for light and writing).
The author understands that any history of photography cannot avoid acknowledging the emergence of truly great practitioners of the art. She has countered this with a series of 'Portrait' panels, where individual artists are examined, pointing out that some photographers like Alfred Stieglitz, '...born one year before the American Civil War ended and died one year after World War II ended', had extraordinary careers in terms of the evolution of camera practice. Her policy is to resist the historians desire to synchronise events into neat packages, preferring to trace the organic extrapolation of discoveries, scientific and technological developments in the hands of photographers across world cultures. Each chapter concludes with a view on how contemporary political and cultural dynamics influenced the images and subject matter of the period. For a dedicated believer in the redeeming potential of the image, this can lead to blind spots and Marien's decision not to make this book a critique of photography - but an informative celebration - necessarily introduced some interesting omissions.
This can be illustrated by the discussion of Dorothea Lange in the chapter on social change and the origins of documentary. Marien is clearly an admirer of Lange and the images of her work during the Depression Era are central to the text on photographers associated with the Farm Security Administration (the others include Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Arthur Rothstein, and latterly Gordon Parks and Esther Bubley) in the 1930s. Lange's very famous image Migrant Mother of 1936 is illustrated in context - on the page of the Midweek Pictorial newspaper - with all the usual emotive comment about 'Madonna and child', noble expression, dignity amidst poverty, and so on. At this time, significantly, Lange was working with writer and political activist Paul Taylor (whom she later married) and the plight of the migrant farm workers was a hot social issue for the educated classes (exemplified in 1939 by Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath). That might have given Marien some clue as to Lange's agenda at the time. Marien notes that the image is '...one of several shots Lange took of a thirty-two-year-old woman and her children, who were stranded in a frozen pea field among the crop they hoped to pick...'. The picture, with Taylor's text, was sent out to numerous magazine and newspapers across America by the FSA. Whilst Marien does concede that Lange later retouched out what she considered a flaw in the Migrant Mother image (in a debate on images altered for effect by FSA photographers) what might have been more constructive for her readers would have been to outline the full story of the woman in the picture. Dorothea Lange herself spoke about this picture in 1960: '...she told me her age ...that she had been living on frozen vegetables and birds the children had killed in the surrounding fields. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food...' and more in the same vein. Unfortunately, this poignant version was tacitly untrue. In the way of these things, the facts emerged eventually: the woman, Florence Owens Thompson, a Cherokee farm worker and part time waitress, owned the car that had coincidentally broken down alongside the pea pickers camp. Her life partner and father of one of her seven children had gone along the road for help while she waited with the kids. Her son, Troy, noted later: 'we didn't sell any tires, we drove off on them', but gallantly claims: 'I just think she [Lange] had one story mixed up with another'. In a way, this example signifies the whole debate about the single, politically charged documentary still image.
Mary Warner Marien is a professor at Syracuse University, New York, where she teaches courses on photographic history, art criticism and art history. This empathy across the disciplines informs her texts, giving a more broader and insightful interpretation than is usually found in specialist histories. She is particularly strong on the contemporary aspect of photography and the fusion of fine art and photography on the international gallery circuit. She notes that the last two decades of the 20th century saw the intellectual and financial constraints on photographers banished forever, and quotes Peter Galassi of MoMA New York as saying: 'it is the medium of the moment'.
Marien has fought to harness and control - in order to maintain some sort of order and clarity - the explosion of media influences that have taken photography into realms previously undreamed of. Whilst the ever-expanding Internet might be the most obvious influence on image making and exhibiting, scientific advances have introduced new intellectual horizons to conjure with. Yet even these have a resonance with the evolution of camera work: the truly amazing stills transmitted back to earth from the Mars Rovers' Spirit and Opportunity, showing the barren wastes of the ruddy Martian landscape, fascinate contemporary audiences exactly as Roger Fenton's 1855 Crimean study of the rubble strewn, desolate site of the infamous charge of the Light Brigade did our Victorian ancestors.
The tremendous distance travelled by the technology, chemistry, science and creativity of photography since those first tentative steps, taken by Hercules Florence, Joseph Niepce, Louise Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot almost 200 years ago, is humbling. The human ingenuity that has extrapolated the basic concept of the light sensitive chemical process into the digital camera, the sheer creativity that has expanded the basic chronicle into images imbued with all manner of intellectual and political resonance, is an achievement to be felt from within. Mary Warner Marien has the intuition and knowledge to foster this sense of wonder in the reader. Essential reading for anyone involved in the photographic and visual arts today.
