He was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the 'outmoded', in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them.
Walter Benjamin on the Surrealist leader Andre Breton
Push Process is illustrated with photographs taken on black-and-white film (plus a few colour Polaroids, though these are reproduced in black and white). Even in 2000–5, the period from which the photographs date, these were obsolescent technologies. They once seemed natural or innovative, but now seem peculiar, quaint, redundant. Because they are outmoded, we become aware of their specific properties and limitations.
Here are versions of the four cameras I used to take the photographs used in the book (apologies for the image quality): a Polaroid Spectra c. 1980s; a 1955 Rolleiflex; a Voightlander–Cosina Bessa-R – mine was bought new in 2002; and a Tachihara wooden field camera c. 1980s.
A photograph is no longer a second-generation print enlarged from a negative – and before digital technology displaced film, the default state of a photograph went from being a daguerreotype (1840s), to a black-and-white print (mid-nineteenth century until the 1960s, but in several different successive modes, e.g. albumen print, silver–gelatin print; and from glass–plate negatives to celluloid or acrylic strips), to a colour slide transparency (in the 60s and 70s), to a print from a colour negative (in the 80s and 90s).
To their original users, all these technologies seemed intrinsic to the definition of what a photograph was.
To use an outmoded technology is not, therefore, an invitation to nostalgia; or it need not be. It is instead an invitation to consider the results as the product of a historical process.
‘The illiteracy of the future’, someone has said, ‘will
be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography’. But shouldn’t a
photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted an
illiterate? Won’t inscription become the most important part of the photograph?
Walter Benjamin, ‘Little
History of Photography’, 1931
The first part of this quotation was cited by the art publisher Phaidon as one of the
inspirations for their 55 series, a set of small
monographs, published in pocket-sized paperback editions c. 2000 (I believe the concept was the brainchild of Chris Boot). Each title in the series was dedicated to an individual photographer and features fifty-five images by him or her, with separate commentary for each image, and an
introductory essay. The format and design for each book in the series was identical: it opened with a
photographic portrait or self-portrait of the subject, followed by the
introduction in continuous text (i.e. with no interpolated illustrations or 'figures'), followed by a series of 55 commentary / image
layouts, most of which had a short passage of text on the left page (verso) and a
photograph on the right page (recto). At the end of the book, there was a chronology for the
subject’s life and work, followed by a final page with
biographical notes for photographer and commentator / editor.
The initial price of each volume was £4.95 in the UK. The
idea was to provide affordable, portable introductions to the work of
key photographers, to enable people to acquire a library of such works,
in much the same way that Penguin Classics encouraged engagement with the
literature of the past in postwar Britain. They were readable not only in the
sense of being written for non-specialists, but in the sense you could slip
them in your pocket and take them out to browse on the bus or train.
There were of course other, related publishing initiatives
(besides my collection of Phaidon 55s, I have several volumes from the Photo
Poche series by Delpire, published originally in French, but acquired by me in
various languages, depending on where and when I was able to get hold of them). However, the Phaidon series seems to me to have been the
most imaginative and ambitious because of its use of text, which was, incidentally,
typeset in light grey (with black for the headings). In skipping from photograph to text, the grey therefore served as a sort of calibration for the tonal scale of the image.
While the design and production of the books was uniform,
the protocol for the selection of the images and the nature of the commentary
differed from title to title. In most cases, a curator chose the 55 images and
wrote both the introduction and the commentary. In some cases, a critic wrote
the introduction, but the photographer made the selection and / or wrote the
commentary. Some of the chosen writers contributed rather
dull, pseudo-academic introductions that occasionally lapsed into artspeak, but
in other cases the combination of writer and photographer was inspired: for
example, in the volume on Walker Evans, where the text is by Luc (now Lucy) Sante.
The direct commentary on the photographs was usually evocative and incisive,
since it was almost always less than one hundred words per image, and it also avoided technical information (these were not 'how-to' books). But it
otherwise varied greatly, both in tone and in what we might call its terms of
engagement with the images. The commentary for the Eugene Richards 55, for
example (by Charles Bowden), is a sort of continuous rolling jazz riff on the circumstances and
characters of the human subjects of the images, cut into 55 short segments that
run on into one another, like a Beat poem.
I own almost all of the paperback 55s, and in acquiring them
I encountered many photographers about whom I previously knew nothing, so from
my point-of-view the concept was an unqualified success, their only flaw being
that the binding and glue tends to fall apart with extensive use (a problem
that may be attributable to the paper, which is necessarily thicker than that used for most paperbacks). However, Phaidon significantly
revised the project in the mid-2000s, when they started to issue new titles in
the series (along with selected reprints of popular earlier titles) in a
larger, hardback format, and at an increased price. So, perhaps, from Phaidon's point-of-view, the initial concept did not prove to be cost-effective.
The newer iteration of the project was still cheaper than many
photographic monographs or exhibition catalogues, but not by much - their 55 title on Edward Curtis was initially advertised at £22.95! At that price, I'd only buy a volume if I had a prior interest in the subject, and even then I'd have to consider it carefully. The increased price and page size also discouraged browsing and continual use, whereas, because of the cheap price, I didn't much mind if the original paperbacks became dogeared or worn from carrying them around.
The 55 series was not only an essential part of my visual education,
but also a primer for the second part of Benjamin’s comment above (along with the work of John Szarowski): they taught
me how to write about photographs in a
concise and meaningful way.
Since most of my photography books are currently in boxes in a shed in Melbourne, I re-bought many of the most relevant 55 titles secondhand on ebay in 2020–1 as I started taking photographs again, and as I rewrote the manuscript that became Push Process. I found them just as useful then as I had twenty years before – and there's been no successor line. Even in 2021, the secondhand copies were still the cheapest way to obtain an overview of the work of many photographers.
Robert Adams was one of the photographers showcased in the celebrated New Topographics exhibition held at George Eastman House in 1975, which explored the ‘man-altered landscape’. That is, instead of the romantic, picturesque or sublime tradition of landscape photography exemplified in the US by Ansel Adams, the Topographics participants did not try to avoid evidence of human presence or intervention, but instead made this their main subject. And their aesthetic was, in most cases, one of blankness and detachment: certainly there were no romantic, picturesque or sublime images. Much of the emphasis in New Topographics was on suburbia, on the liminal zones around cities that had greatly expanded in the post-war period, an expansion made possible both by the proliferation of cheap, generic housing estates, and by the huge increase in car ownership, along with the concomitant growth of freeways.
Robert Adams, however, was not blank. His approach was more critical. One of the reasons he carried weight for me was that he worked as an English lecturer while creating these images, and he’s an eloquent writer on photography. The New West is not text-heavy, but it does include a short introduction by John Szarkowski, followed by another from Adams, who also wrote brief passages introducing each of the five chapters into which The New West is divided. These move through consecutive ecological zones in Colorado, each characterised by different patterns of human settlement or intervention: ‘Prairie’, ‘Tracts and Mobile Homes’ (i.e. suburbs), ‘The City’, ‘Foothills’, and ‘Mountains’. However, apart from these very brief chapter introductions, we revert to the Evans/Frank model, with no text accompanying the images themselves other than short titles. As with American Photographs, the images are arranged one per spread on the recto, but with the titles on the preceding verso as in The Americans. The titles also follow the same pattern as Frank’s book, with most limited to a statement of location and/or a categorisation of subject (‘Along Interstate 25’, ‘Newly occupied tract homes. Colarado Springs’), with an occasional described detail or indication of context where Adams thinks it might not be sufficiently obvious from the image itself (‘Grazing land with pines. Near Falcone’).
Szarkowski's foreword sets out the issues at stake succinctly:
As Americans we are scarred by the dream of innocence. In our hearts we still believe that the only truly beautiful landscape is an unpeopled one. …. Now however we are beginning to realize that there is no wilderness left. … a generous and accepting attitude toward nature requires that we learn to share the earth not only with ice, dust, mosquitoes, starlings, coyotes, and chicken hawks, but even with other people. (5)
Adams’s pictures describe with precision and fastidious justice some of the mortal and venial sins that we have committed against our land in recent decades. …. But his pictures also show us that these settlements express human aspirations, and that they are therefore not uninteresting. (8–9)
Though Robert Adams’s book assumes no moral postures, it does have a moral. Its moral is that the landscape is, for us, the place we live. If we have used it badly, we cannot therefore scorn it, without scorning ourselves. If we have abused it, broken its health, and erected upon it memorials to our ignorance, it is still our place, and before we can proceed we must learn to love it. (9)
Adams’s introduction is even more direct:
Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue—why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?
One reason is, of course, that we do not live in parks …. we also need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.
The subject of these pictures is, in this sense, not tract homes or freeways but the source of all Form, light. The Front Range is astonishing because it is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. Even subdivisions, which we hate for the speculator’s greed, are at certain times of day transformed to a dry, cold brilliance. (11–12)
I haven’t seen the first edition of The New West, but the Steidl reprint from 2015 is of very high quality – along with the tri-tone reproductions, I suspect that digital pre-print processes and Photoshop have allowed a longer tonal range and greater sharpness relative to the first analogue edition. (I think there was also an earlier reprint in 2008, perhaps by Aperture, which I may in fact have a copy of in a box in a shed in Melbourne, but I'm consulting the 2015 edition for this post).
Adams's images are mostly high-key, i.e. with predominantly bright tones and few shadows. As Tod Papageorge puts it:
[he] printed his photographs to distill the brilliant Colorado sunlight to a virtually nuclear intensity that, even as it glared down on the poor things it exposed, seemed to envelop and, occasionally, succor them.
This effect is also due to the fact that a significant proportion of the images were shot close to midday, so that the light is coming straight down, and there's little shade. A more conventional photographer would have preferred the warmer, more sculptural side-lighting of late afternoon or early morning (as Evans did, for example).
In some ways, Adams’s approach recalls that of David Goldblatt, shooting in Apartheid-era South Africa, in which deliberate overexposure was used not only to suggest the cutting light of the veldt, but the brutal social realities depicted. There is nowhere to hide in this pitiless light, no escaping the photographer’s clear-eyed judgements. But Adams is careful to retain detail in the highlights. Papageorge relates how the latter used a particularly laborious developing method, because he wanted to make sure that the empty skies retained smooth tones (the skies are bright but never blown-out to pure white in these images).
It’s also worth noting that the predominant high-key images are occasionally alternated with low-key images shot at dusk, or even at night. The Steidl edition has tritone reproductions, which means each image had three separate passes through the printer with different inks to ensure clear tonal separations. So there’s a high level of visual detail and texture, in both the shadows of the low-key images and the highlights of the high-key ones. In other words, things are described with great care – in all senses of the word.
Papageorge says that Adams used a Rolleiflex for these images – I shot many of my Venice photographs on a version of the same camera. Like the nearly identical camera used by Ed van der Elsken in the 50s, a Rolleiflex creates square negatives approximately 6x6cm, and most models of the camera have a fixed, ‘normal’ lens. If Papageorge is correct, that means that all of the images in The New West likely have the same undramatic angle of view – this seems plausible. (A few are slightly rectangular, but they may just have been cropped. Papageorge says that Adams did not obtain the 6x7 Pentax camera he used for his next project until after finishing The New West.) The square format adds to the sense of detachment, of little visual emphasis being given to any particular element within the frame. Similarly, most of the images maximise depth of field, and most are long shots, surveying landscapes from a considerable distance, sometimes with hundreds of metres or even several kilometres separating the foreground from the background.
Adams had used a large-format view camera for his earlier work on churches. The Rolleiflex allowed much faster operation, but did not permit perspective correction in the way that the larger camera did. This means that, for architectural subjects, you either have to point the camera up and get converging verticals, or stand back and accept that you’ll have a relatively large area of foreground below your main subject in the frame. In some of the landscapes, Adams seems to gone for the former strategy, in particular where there are no real vertical lines. The result is that the sky occupies two-thirds of the frame, to emphasise its enveloping weight. But for the tract houses that form the subject of the longest chapter he keeps the camera alignment level so that the verticals are straight. Many of these images do in fact have a wide strip of foreground: empty, bleached dirt or schist, or sometimes tarmac or pavement. Indeed, these houses and mobile homes are not really shot as architectural subjects, but again from some distance – that is, set within the larger landscape. And Adams uses the foreground to balance – almost seeming to reflect – the blank, or almost blank strip of sky above. In some cases, the houses appear lost between these two empty expanses. In other cases, Adams has obviously sought out an elevated viewpoint, so he was above his main subject, which allows him to create a more synthetic composition, linking houses in the foreground to the larger developments of which they form a part in the background.
Only in the chapter on ‘The City’ does Adams get closer in, and perhaps not coincidentally, he’s also more explicitly judgemental here: ‘Here no expediency is forbidden. …. Read the eschatological chaos of signs.’ (75) Here Adams seems too bleak – for him, cities offer only 'disgust and nihilism' (11). But in the face of the current gathering climate catastrophe, he's elsewhere too optimistic in his conviction that 'even as we see the harm of our work and determine to correct it, we also see that nothing can, in the last analysis, intrude. Nothing permanently diminishes the affirmation of the sun.' (12)
The New West is a powerful book, but it has a narrower thematic range than American Photographs, and less visual variety. The groupings into chapters are an essential part of the book’s organisation, but within the individual chapters I’m less convinced that the precise sequence of individual images is crucial. Rather, each chapter contains multiple variations on the same idea: the repetition and the standardised approach is part of the critique. Papageorge points out that Adams shares several motifs with Evans (who he claims not to have been influenced by): ‘cars, gas stations, roadways, jerrybuilt working class cottages, modest homes sighted down empty streets, improvised churches’. But for Evans these motifs are placed in the context of an encounter between industrial civilisation and popular culture: the mass-produced is juxtaposed with the handmade, the improvised. And Evans is interested in faces – the bodily correlate to the hand-painted signs and appropriated ephemera he also depicts – whereas the few visible humans in The New West are dwarfed by the landscape, and therefore stripped of personality (apart perhaps from the teenager sitting in the minute shade cast by a mobile home, for even the choice to seek that shelter depicts him as having agency). For Adams then, there does not seem to be any possibility of resistance to the shoddiness and soullessness of the world depicted – except, that is, via the light of his photographs.
I’ve already mentioned in my post on Brassaï that I overexposed my images of Venice: partly with the intention of approaching my subject differently to him, and partly by accident. Adams (and Goldblatt) helped me to think further about the aesthetics of overexposure – which I had to think about, whether I liked it or not, since overexposed images were what I had. I was also influenced by a conversation with Ross Gibson about his work on the historical police archive of crime-scene photographs in Sydney, in which deliberate overexposure was a way to ensure that none of the relevant information would be illegible in the image.
Adams’s compositional strategies weren’t of much use to me, since the kind of distance and/or elevation they rely upon are impossible to obtain in Venice (unless you resort to cliché and go up a belltower or stand on the Accademia bridge). But his broader approach was relevant, even though Venice seems to offer completely different lessons to the Colorado West. From its foundation the history of Venice involved radical interventions in the lagoon landscape, but the city has often been seen as an exemplary instance of equilibrium between human settlement and the environment, since Venice was dependent on the lagoon for its survival: for food, transport, access to the wider world, even sanitation. A photographic project more directly inspired by Adams might instead focus on the industrial hinterland of Porto Marghera on the mainland – and indeed there was such a project around the turn of the millenium, which actually recruited two of the original participants in the New Topographics show, among many other international and Italian photographers.
Adams’s example was nonetheless useful by analogy. Just as landscape photographers like Ansel Adams refused to acknowledge the existence of the man-altered landscape, most attempts to depict Venice refuse to acknowledge the contemporary, or decry its presence. Just as Ansel Adams chose to depict scenes in which the only acknowledged human presence was himself (‘acknowledged’ only insofar as someone had to be taking the photograph), so many visitors to Venice dream of finding an ‘unspoilt’ corner of the city in which they are the only alien presence – the only tourist chosen to enter Shrangi-La. So even though almost every detail in my images is not only ‘man-altered’ but human-made – emphatically historical rather than natural – I wanted to start by acknowledging and insisting upon the absurdity of this dream. There is no wilderness untouched by human culture; there is no unspoilt corner of Venice untouched by the contemporary world.
There are very few telephoto compositions in Push Process: of the sixty or so unique images, only four (unless you count the shots taken on 35mm film using a 50mm lens). Here’s two large-format, telephoto images (they’re square because they’re both cropped from the 5x4 originals).
There’s a small group of images in the book on the theme of restoration and repair. There’s always somewhere in Venice marked off for work of this kind, and while for many visitors this represents a disappointment, to me it was an opportunity to defamiliarise the urban landscape. Often this kind of work involves erecting scaffolding to cover the façade of buildings, and then covering the scaffolding in translucent grey sheets, turning the surfaces of buildings into anonymous masks. But at some point during the period I was photographing in Venice, they instead started printing to-scale representations of the building underneath on the sheeting, to mimimise the visual disruption. Very postmodern!
The left side of the first image is an example of that: here the reproduction merges more or less seamlessly with the original façade of the palace that now houses the municipal casino. I found the casino seedy during my one visit there, as one of the characters in Push Process suggests: ‘There has to be something at stake for you personally, or it ruins the illusion, and suddenly all you can see are the mouldy curtains, the middle-aged playboys with yellow stains on their fingertips.’
I was also tempted to use this because of the ghostly water taxi (the only example of that craft I had on film), and the light trails, which are probably from a vaporetto moving through the space during the exposure.
The second image is of the railway terminus at Santa Marta – beyond the station itself, where they shunt trains that are not in use. There’s some novelty simply in seeing an image of railway lines in Venice, but if this was an image taken elsewhere, I likely wouldn’t consider it sufficiently interesting on its own terms.
In Push Process, I tried to argue – and to dramatise – the idea that photography is something one does with the whole body, not a disembodied eye. Below is an extract from an interview with Stephen Shore on the same theme:
Stephen Shore: I was thinking of how I would approach the issue
of embodiment in photographic terms, and that is if you become aware of
yourself as a physical object in space, as though you were a dancer moving
through the space of a room, your perception changes, your perception of space
changes, your perception of time changes, and to the degree that that perceptual change is visual, it could be communicated in a photograph. So the sense
of space is often the easiest of these subtler qualities to talk about, but if
your physical awareness of yourself changes your perception of space, if you
are a photographer that has had a lot of experience, a practiced photographer
who has control of the medium, the picture you take can communicate that. Michael Fried: Yes. What struck me in [your] landscape photos ... is that I felt something intensely empathic
about, for example, the way they depicted the unevenness of the ground. And
about the way in which they treated the whole question of relative distance.
It had to be read. I mean I was keenly aware of the visual work I had to do
to make my way imaginatively through the photos, to figure out distances, to
read scale relations. Let's say there is something at a certain distance, it
might be a big rock or it might be a smaller one. Everything depends on
whether it is a big rock at 800 yards or a small rock at 75 yards, and those
photographs don't immediately deliver that information. They make you work
for it, and I came to feel that the labor of construal they forced me to do
was implicitly physical, if you see what I mean. It was more than just
mental, it was equivalent to imagining myself having to physically negotiate that space. So they were for me extremely interesting photos precisely with
respect to the issue of bodiliness and empathy. Also, they made me register
the unevenness of the ground in a more than strictly visual way -- the way I
would have done had I been walking on it, climbing that slope, or coming back
down.
There are many images and books by David Goldblatt I could have chosen to showcase here. He was one of the most important documentary photographers of the late twentieth century, and most of his work was dedicated to recording Apartheid-era South Africa. Like Walker Evans, he worked with a variety of different cameras and with a variety of different approaches, adapting his technique according to the circumstances and purpose.
This image is from a series of photographs Goldblatt took underground in the gold mines of South Africa in the late 60s, working on 35mm film, although he also shot formal portraits of miners and their white supervisors above ground on medium-format during the same period. This body of work was published in 1973 in his book co-authored with the writer Nadine Gordimer, On the Mines.
The justification for these badly degraded pictures had nothing to do with self-expression. On the contrary. For Goldblatt, the subject was so important as to both render the technical limitations of the pictures trivial by comparison, and to demand an absolute surrender of self. Goldblatt’s struggle with his equipment, which constantly broke down and jammed underground, paid homage to the miners’ struggle with their environment. Although visible blur and grain clearly draw attention to the photograph as an artefact, they are here paradoxically taken as proof that the reality of the mines is so powerful as to overwhelm the camera’s ability to contain it.
A similar tolerance of degradation can be observed in pictures of unique, newsworthy events, such as the famous photograph of Robert Kennedy bleeding to death. In pictures like this, the event violently breaks into the continuity of everyday life, and the degradation of the image mimics that violence. Goldblatt appropriated this rhetoric by treating the everyday realities and routines of work as if they were just as dramatic, heroic and uniquely unrepeatable as the fate of world leaders.
What interests me about Goldblatt's mine photographs is the notion of stepping right up to the edge of incoherence, but without ever stepping over it.
Diane Arbusis one of the most influential monographs in the history of photography. Since it was first published in 1972, a year after Arbus’s untimely death, it has continued to provoke strong reactions in viewers, who see contradictory meanings in Arbus’s confrontational pictures of teenagers, outsiders, freaks, nudists and psychiatric inmates. Compassion, curiosity, openness to other ways of being; cruelty, prurience, voyeurism: even Arbus herself was not entirely certain which category her work falls into.
Arbus never published a book in her lifetime – her biggest exposure was in 1967 as one of the three featured photographers in the New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (with Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander). Diane Arbus is not, then, strictly speaking a 'self-titled' book, because it was edited after her death by her friend, the painter Marvin Israel, and her daughter, Doon Arbus. It features eighty photographs – a small selection of those available in Arbus’ archive. They date from 1962–71, the last decade of Arbus’s life - her forties, more or less. It’s a masterpiece of editing, cut to the bone. Every image is remarkable, though some are more remarkable than others. The sequence jumps around chronologically, except at the very end where there is a small group of consecutive images all dating from 1971, depicting residents at a psychiatric institution.
For many years, this was the only work by Arbus freely available, and her estate holders were criticised for not allowing wider access to her archives, but in a sense the posthumous success of Diane Arbus reveals the effectiveness of their strategy. There have been several other volumes printed recently – a set of the 1971 photographs, a compilation of magazine work from the early 60s, and the catalogue for a recent retrospective; but the first cut is still the deepest. Thinking of the posthumous creation of this unique monograph reminds me of the relationship between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish - perhaps Arbus might not recognise herself in the book that bears her name.
Except that the voice of the photographs is there in the written preface too. Informal, ironic, intellectually inquisitive, but impatient of theory and abstractions. The preface is full of quotable aphorisms, which speak powerfully of Arbus's aesthetic:
Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. It’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s. A whore I knew once showed me a photo album of Instamatic colour pictures she’d taken of guys she’d picked up. I don’t mean kissing ones. Just guys sitting on beds in hotel rooms. I remember one of a man in a bra. He was just an ordinary, milktoast sort of man, and he had just tried on a bra. Like anybody would try on a bra, like anybody would try on what the other person had that he didn’t have. It was heartbreaking. It was really a beautiful photograph.
These are all Arbus’s words, but none of them were written down by her. Instead, it's a collage transcribed from excerpts
of taped interviews. So, in fact, the preface is a masterpiece of editing too.
However much I might admire Arbus's photographic work, it has little in common with my own. But I found her voice in the preface to the 1972 monograph compelling. Insofar as I was able to write effectively about photography in Push Process, I learned to do so in part from her.
All the published photos in Push Process are printed in black and white, and the vast majority were also shot on black and white film, but about one quarter to one third of the photographs I took in Venice were actually shot on colour negative, or (particularly for 35mm) colour slide film. Indeed, six of the images in Push Process (about 10% of the total) are converted from colour originals.
Here are three other colour images in their original glory. The first is a rare close-up, which is about the transition from analogue to digital: I mean that it juxtaposes a manual ticket-stamp machine at a vaporetto stop with a digital swipe machine. The new machine had already replaced the old one – some time in 2004 I think – but the latter had yet to be removed.
The second image is of the ‘back’ entrance to Piazza San Marco, though I was more interested in the pay phones: I was always trying to place the classical version of Venice within the modern infrastructure that makes our encounter with it possible. In this case, the pay phones are now a historical, obsolete example of that infrastructure.
The third image is of the car ferry that runs between Tronchetto and the Lido (and other locations around the edges of the lagoon). The last two images have the acid colours of uncorrected artificial lighting.
This piece is adapted from a portion of an academic article I published in 2011, which is based around the photographs that are now included in my novel Push Process. It's therefore a more explicit discussion of some of the themes underlying both the images and the novel's approach to its Venetian setting.
Venice one of the most photographed cities in the world. A study from the early twenty-first century estimated that over a hundred million snaps were taken each year in the city’s historical centre – but this was before the advent of camera phones, which have certainly increased that figure exponentially. Thousands of images of the Bridge of Sighs are created every day, all from exactly the same vantage point. Most of these photographs show a ‘timeless’ landscape of gondolas, fog, and decaying palaces. Of course this is an illusion. Venice is not immune from history. The endless work of conservation is not a battle against time, which would be futile, but an attempt to reach a workable understanding with history as an inevitable process of ageing and change.
Existing alongside the picturesque city is its less attractive shadow: a postmodern Venice overwhelmed by debased representations of itself. It flourishes despite the fact that, in other respects, Venice’s qualifications for the role of postmodern city seem poor. Venice has no cars, no freeways, no skyscrapers, no industrial parks, no malls, and – perhaps most importantly of all – no suburbs, or at least none physically continuous with the historical centre. Venetian architecture is not composed of anonymous and interchangeable units. On the contrary, its form cannot be understood without reference to its unique history – a history that sometimes seems a crippling burden rather than a rich inheritance, at least to those who are obliged to live there.
Venice’s principal claim to the title of postmodern city, then, is that its economy depends entirely on mass tourism. The current registered resident population is about 51,000, while the approximate number of tourists who visit the city annually was – again, at the beginning of the twenty-first century – 14,000,000. On the peak weekend of Carnival in 2002 alone, about 270,000 people passed through. Venice has four times as many visitors annually as Florence does and the vast majority are funnelled into the area around Piazza San Marco. Every day during summer, the number of tourists and temporary visitors comes close to or surpasses the number of residents – a situation that surely makes Venice unique among the major cities of the world, as much as its situation and architecture do.
Through camera phones and the viewfinders of camcorders, most visitors see not a living community, or a complex history, but rather a series of isolated motifs filtered or chosen in advance. In short, it is almost impossible to see a real gondola without thinking of it as a superior version of a plastic one. During Carnival, a tradition with a long history, but one that was artificially resurrected in 1979 and was until recently sponsored by Volkswagen, it is always possible to find a number of people with elaborate costumes wandering around near Piazza San Marco – my strong suspicion is that they are employed by the Commune to dress up and pose. But if you want to take a snap of them, you will literally have to elbow your way through the scrum. There are three or four photographers for every masker.
There is no local tradition of mask making predating the resurrected Carnival.3 Nonetheless, the mask shops multiplied in the 1980s and 1990s, as did the fast-food outlets. By 2000, ‘Venice could claim the dubious distinction of having more pizzerias than Naples and the highest density of ice-cream shops of any city in Europe’. The two developments are obviously related. Why, then, do the many photo books dedicated to Carnival never show anyone eating a slice of pizza? The answer is obvious: the rules of ‘Carnival photography’ were established almost as quickly after 1979 as the spurious tradition of mask making, and those rules preclude images in which maskers do everyday things like eating (or dropping litter, an activity to which they are also prone). Immaculate costumes, frozen postures, saturated colours, and spaces cleared of spectators – these are the norm in a vision at once idealised and supremely kitsch.
Such images, together with the fog-shrouded gondolas of innumerable coffee-table books, are only the latest manifestations of a long tradition. Venice was the first city to be packaged and prepared for consumption in the form of visual souvenirs. In the eighteenth century, the ‘view’ paintings of Canaletto were mainly sold to British aristocrats, and the painter’s early career was (not coincidentally) sponsored and overseen by the man who later became British consul to the city. Locals did not buy Canaletto paintings. They rather looked down upon the whole view genre.
The tradition begun by Canaletto and his contemporaries was taken up by early studio photographers in the mid-nineteenth century. Painters had already initiated a process whereby customers could choose from a set of prototypical views, versions of which would then be knocked up in the studio and finished by a team of assistants, but production became more mechanical and industrialised at the same time as modern, industrialised means of transport increased the volume of tourist traffic and changed its character sociologically. A railway bridge to Venice was opened in the 1840s, just as the first photographs of the city appeared. If Canaletto painted for aristocrats, then the new medium was available to the middle classes, but just as locals had not bought the paintings of Canaletto, so they did not buy photographic albums and prints either. A Venetian economist noted in 1870 that the booming ‘sale of photographic work is … in direct proportion to the number of foreigners who come to Venice’.
In the period before the advent of cheap, efficient photo-reproduction, studios still managed to extend massively the process by which production was segmented and depersonalised. They used a complex division of labour to churn out souvenir albums, into which twenty or so individual prints were pasted. Thus the studio owner, whose name was nominally appended to the album, did not necessarily operate the camera; nor did he print the negatives. A large staff of technicians and assistants contributed. The most prestigious of these were not the camera operators, but rather the retouchers, whose manipulations were thought to bring the images closer to the realm of art. The retouchers sometimes worked directly on negatives, but they also hand-coloured, tinted, or otherwise altered prints – for example, to give the impression of a moonlit scene, an effect that was much in demand at the time. Albums produced by different studios are not readily distinguishable from each other or easy to date with precision. This is because the layout, subjects, and points of view were all highly standardised; and particular images were often recycled or even pirated. Most also appear to have been taken at the same time of day: early in the morning, to exclude tourists and other bystanders. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the industry was further transformed by the introduction of the postcard, an object even more inextricably linked with the tourist experience.
At the same time as the conditions necessary to create the postmodern city were developing, the definitive version of the anti-modern, timeless city came into being. Foreign visitors were also crucial here. As Venetian art and architecture were increasingly consumed by an international audience in the later nineteenth century (partly through photographic reproductions), Venice began to be seen as a city that belonged to the world. It was part of the shared artistic and cultural patrimony that is now called ‘Western civilisation’. As such it needed to be protected from the barbarians who would destroy it, as well as from the elements that threatened to engulf it. These barbarians sometimes included the tourist hordes, from whose grasp a more exclusive or authentic experience of the city had to be snatched. According to John Pemble, in the nineteenth century ‘the idea of a dying city became one of the most potent obsessions of the European and American imagination’, but at the same time ‘a passionate battle was fought and won to fabricate for Venice the illusion of immortality’. The city was in imminent danger of destruction, from decay and flooding; but the city was also inspirational, and somehow above everyday realities and concerns.
The most representative and influential figure in promoting these ideas was the Englishman John Ruskin, who was one of the first to celebrate the city’s medieval architecture in The Stones of Venice, first published in 1851–3. Although Ruskin strongly opposed restoration projects that removed later additions and weathering in a misguided search for ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ forms, he nonetheless bemoaned the introduction of anything modern into the cityscape. For Ruskin, indeed, industrialisation was the source of all evil, and medieval Venice represented an alternative, superior civilisation. So, in 1845, he complained to his father about the new railway bridge and the recently installed gas lighting:
We turned the corner of the bastion, where Venice once appeared, & behold – the Greenwich railway, only with less arches and more dead wall, entirely cutting off the whole open sea & half the city, which now looks as nearly as possible like Liverpool at the end of the dockyard wall. … Imagine the new style of serenades – by gas light.
A few days later, he added bitterly that the ‘moment you begin to feel, some gaspipe business forces itself on the eye, and you are thrust into the nineteenth century, until you dream … that your very gondola has become a steamer’.
Under the influence of foreigners like Ruskin, and also local patriots who idealised the Venetian past, an attitude toward the city developed in which it was increasingly treated as an archaeological site, which had to be preserved whole. While unobtrusive improvements to housing and sanitation were welcomed, anything that drastically altered the city’s form or ‘clashed’ with its pre-modern architecture was violently opposed. This attitude reached definitive expression in the so-called ‘Special Law’ of 1973, which forbade demolition or new building in Venice’s historical centre.
The growing influence of Ruskin’s idea of Venice can be demonstrated by the removal of some nineteenth-century additions to the cityscape. For example, numerous cast-iron bridges were installed by the Austrians, who ruled Venice until 1866. Many of these bridges were built by the English firm of Neville, which had a foundry in the city and was a major local employer of the period. At the time of their installation, such modernisations were a source of civic pride, and the Neville bridges included two over the Grand Canal: one at Accademia, and one near the new railway station. Cast iron, like photography, was a symbol of modern technology that made possible new architectural forms like the Parisian arcades. Thus the Accademia Bridge was praised by the Illustrated London News as a ‘handsome structure’ with ‘elegance of form’. By the early twentieth century, attitudes had changed, and the two Neville bridges were demolished and replaced in the early 1930s by more ‘traditional’ designs. Explicitly modern architecture was henceforth confined to peripheral areas like the Lido, which after 1900 was developed as a holiday resort, where the new craze for sea bathing could be indulged in modern hotels.
The prevailing attitude was summed up at the time of the collapse of the Campanile, or belltower, in Piazza San Marco in 1902. The original was completely destroyed, and some architects proposed rebuilding in an Art Deco style, but in the end the Campanile was rebuilt dov’era, com’era, ‘where it was, as it was’, as the motto adopted at the time put it. Hence the current belltower is a facsimile, as indeed are many other objects in Piazza San Marco, including the famous horses on the façade of the Basilica and some of the statues on the columns of the Ducal Palace. All have been replaced for conservation reasons.
This dyad of conservation and conservatism exasperated some people, notably Filippo Marinetti, leader of the Futurists, who visited Venice in 1910 to drop a batch of polemical leaflets from the top of the newly reconstructed belltower. In Marinetti’s philosophy, the future could only realise itself by repudiating the past. Hence the Futurists championed industry and speed, and enjoined the destruction of ‘museums, libraries, academies of every kind’, that is, repositories or tradition and received wisdom. To Marinetti, Venice was one of these stagnant repositories – hence his famous injunction to ‘burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for Cretins’.
In a way, Marinetti shared Ruskin’s conception of the city, but interpreted it in the light of radically different values, and thus proposed an opposite course of action. However, most people wished to preserve Venice ‘where it was, as it was’. Hence the gondola, which is now used solely for pleasure rides by tourists (apart from the traghetti: ferries, which journey between fixed points on opposite sides of the Grand Canal), nonetheless retains its symbolic power as a fetish of Venetianness for locals and visitors alike. The anti-modern Venice and the postmodern Venice are thus not so far apart, as the facsimiles dotted around Piazza San Marco suggest. Indeed, the idea of the city as museum and the idea of the city as kitsch fantasy are actually symbiotic. For most visitors the entire panorama of Venetian history is part of the same homogenous pastness. Both versions of the city deny change. Both present the city as spectacle, and separate from lived reality.
The photographs in Push Process are concerned with the connections between the timeless and postmodern versions of the city, along with another, neglected Venice – a place that attempted to come to terms with modernisation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and was an important industrial centre before the creation of Porto Marghera on the mainland. Venetian architects, planners and politicians have long been occupied by the problem of what to do with the city’s past and how to face its future.The places that interest me are those where the response to this question has been most pro-active – for example, the vaporetto stops, elements in the ferry system which is Venice’s typically peculiar attempt to construct a modern transportation network.
Here’s a short introduction to some of the photographs from Push Process, which highlights the themes broached in this piece:
Select Bibliography
Robert C. Davis and Garry P. Marvin, Venice, the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World’s Most Touristed City, University of California Press, 2004.
John Pemble, Venice Rediscovered, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Margaret Plant, Venice: Fragile City, 1797–1997, Yale University Press, 2002.
Sarah Quill with Alan Windsor, Ruskin’s Venice: The Stones Reconsidered, Lund Humphries, 2003.
These two large-format images were in the concluding photosequence for Push Process until the last minute, both of them near the beginning in the section dealing with looking and the commodification of spectacle. (For this theme, see the video at the end of the post.)
The first was taken at the exact position from which everyone photographs the Bridge of Sighs, but with the camera turned about seventy-five degrees to the left: this decision was itself a kind of joke. The sculpture that is the focus of the composition depicts the Drunkenness of Noah: the Biblical patriarch (foreshortened on the left side) is making a spectacle of himself after overindulging, and his sons respond differently. One highlights his father’s shame: ‘Look at this disgusting old man!’ The other averts his eyes in filial piety and makes to cover Noah’s nakedness.
It’s also an unusual example of a high-key, low-contrast night scene.
Still, it felt a bit too conventional, and I was trying to minimise the number of conventional images of the city.
The second image is of a fairground ride with a Wild West theme: the triangular object in the centre is supposed to be a wigwam. This kind of grossly simplistic historical representation is only possible: a) because it’s a ride for children; and b) because we are a long way from any context in which anyone has an ongoing stake in the terms of this presentation. But in its crude way it’s still a spectacular commodification of history, and moreover an interactive one – and it therefore serves to emphasise how the current iteration of Carnival does much the same thing with Venetian history.
But I'm not entirely convinced by it as an image.
Also: the fact that both these images require a lengthy explanation to justify their possible inclusion worked against them.
The title of Robert Frank’s The Americans knowingly places it in conversation with Evans’s American Photographs from 1938, which Frank used as an 'iconographical sourcebook' (the phrase is Tod Papageorge's). Indeed, Evans sponsored Frank’s application for the Guggenheim Fellowship he used to finance the cross-country trips on which the images were taken, and these trips sometimes followed itineraries suggested by Evans based on his travels while employed by the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s. But there are important differences as well as similarities.
Evans was interested in what he took to be a shared American vernacular culture. And for the FSA, if not for Evans, the disadvantaged human subjects of his photos were all aspirant participants in a shared American dream. They were just down on their luck, and needed a helping hand to participate fully. But by the time we get to Frank, there is no unified community to which his book's title might refer; or rather, for Frank, 'society is an association of minorities', to use a phrase John le Carre gives to his character George Smiley. The Americans therefore depicts a multiplicity of subcultures: bikers, Jews on Yom Kippur, a portrait of three trans people that is very striking, not only because such people were rarely depicted in documentary photography of this period, but because it’s one of only two images where Frank's subjects are smiling and playing to the camera.
The Americans may not be a unified vision of America, but it is a very inclusive one, with many African Americans, as well as Latinos, possibly Native Americans (two hitchhikers driving Frank's car) and, indirectly, Asian Americans (via the photo of a 'Chinese cemetery'). One might say that Frank occupies one of several roles in relation to these various milieux or subcultures: a passer-by, a visitor, or sometimes perhaps a guest, but he's never a member, still less a participant.
There are several examples of what I would call temporary pseudo-communities: bars, a casino, a factory, crowds at a film premiere, kids gathered round a jukebox, men crammed together along the counter of a diner (but all intent on their own eating). The political events also fall into this category, since there’s an emphasis on the hollowness of the rhetoric and the underlying realpolitik of wheeling and dealing: the grimacing or sneezing city father on a platform; the tuba player with an Adlai Stevenson badge whose instrument obscures their face so that its parping mouth comes to stand for the rally as a whole; the small group of men huddled together like mafiosi in a convention hall, oblivious to the larger crowd behind them ('sleek face earnest wheedling confiding cigarholding union boss fat as Nero and eager as Caesar in the thunderous beer crash hall leaning over to confide' as Jack Kerouac puts it in his introduction to the book).
Many pictures, however, show people alone – distracted, miserable, or just silent and self-contained. Or, if not literally alone, then psychologically so – for example, the man getting his shoes shined in a Memphis men's room. This image is particularly interesting: nominally a portrait of deference and privilege (the black man bent down at the feet of the white), but here transformed into what Kerouac calls 'the loneliest picture ever made, the urinals that women never see, the shoeshine going on in sad eternity'. It's tempting to read the hand over the man's face as a gesture born of shame, but more likely Frank just waited for a moment when the man's view of him was occluded, so he couldn't see Frank take the picture. This is also one of many photographs in the book depicting people engaged in service work (waitresses, a nurse, an elevator girl).
The larger idea of the country is still there, but it's represented primarily by shared symbols: the images of American flags that effectively divide the book into chapters, most of which are a little ragged and tattered (like America itself, they’ve seen better days) – and also by the cars and highways, by cowboys and jukeboxes. It's perhaps telling that the two photos of cowboys – both titled as connected to rodeo shows – were taken in Detroit and New York: that is, they're of men assuming the role as performers or audience members for a kind of travelling-circus version of the West.
As with Evans’s work, the images in The Americans are of public scenes. Unlike Evans’s, many of them depict interiors, but these are also public places: not houses, but cafes, bars, diners, restaurants, railway cars, hotels, municipal buildings. There are no domestic scenes or posed portraits at all. Cars are ubiquitous, partly because Frank’s project was conceived and executed as a series of road trips. There are plenty of cars in Evans too, but they were not so central to American life in the 1930s as they had become by 1955–6, when Frank worked. The paraphernalia of car culture is also everywhere: gas stations, rest-stop cafes, road intersections, casualties of road accidents. Again, Evans photographed car junkyards and garages, but it’s more insistent in Frank, and the infrastructure of automobile culture has become more complex. By contrast, a tram, a ferry, and a train interior all appear exactly once – and buses and aeroplanes are completely absent, though there are several photographs of urban pedestrians.
Unlike Evans, Frank shows little interest in architecture as a subject in and of itself – and despite the emphasis on cars, the suburbs are entirely absent. As the title of the book suggests, the majority of photographs have a human presence as their animating subject: that is, even if such subjects only occupy a small part of the frame, they are seemingly the justification for the photograph’s existence. There are several restricted milieux where, without the support of an institution like the FSA, Frank must have negotiated access himself (the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago, a Detroit factory, a funeral among the black community).
In The Photobook: A History, Gerry Badger places The Americans with Ed van der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank as an example of 'stream-of-consciousness' photography – indeed as the definitive example of this mode, which Badger links to Existentialism in philosophy, to Abstract Expressionism in painting, to bebop jazz in music, and to the Beat movement in literature. Frank's book is certainly 'rough, raw and gestural ... spontaneous and immediate, highly personal ... exciting, expressive, flying in the face of accepted photographic good taste' (233). But there's something here that goes against the stream-of-consciousness characterisation, as there also is in van der Elsken's book. In The Americans, although a minority of the images are of people glancing back at the camera, for the most part they’re not about the subjects’ response to Frank, and unlike in Love on the Left Bank, many images are quite clearly of people unaware of being photographed. Indeed, these rely on our sense of Frank’s invisibility for their force: of overlooking people caught off-guard, eating alone in a San Francisco cafeteria or sleeping in a park with their shoes off. Kerouac has it right: Frank 'sneaks around'; he has the 'strange secrecy of a shadow'. And this self-effacement seems at odds with the idea of an insistent authorial voice.
Some of Frank’s first viewers complained that this was a negative and ugly view of America: Papageorge quotes initial reviews that dismissed the book as 'warped', 'sick', 'neurotic' and 'joyless'. Some of the images are certainly ironic, if not satirical: besides the union bosses above, we might note the sailor at a Navy recruitment office visible only from his feet propped up on a desk ('Join the Navy Ask me about it' says the sticker on the side of the desk); or the racially segregated streetcar in New Orleans whose occupants all look separately at Frank, caged between the bars of its windows. This is another one of the images where Frank’s acknowledged presence is crucial to the effect, although it also relies upon his separateness from the subjects. But as with Evans, one senses that everything included here was of interest to Frank: he didn’t photograph out of enmity or disgust, but curiosity.
Evans used a variety of cameras, which required different kinds of engagement with his subjects. By contrast, every photograph in The Americans is taken from a 35mm negative, and, if I’m not mistaken, all of them were shot handheld and without flash. There's some debate online about what lenses Frank used: I thought (and to me the visual appearance of the photographs confirms this) that most of the images were shot on a ‘normal’ 50mm lens, one whose angle of view corresponds roughly to how we directly perceive a scene. But some images may have been taken on a wider 35mm lens, and a few are certainly telephoto compositions (e.g. a group at a cocktail party seemingly shot from a distance).
In using available light and preferring a 50mm lens, Frank’s approach echoes that of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose The Decisive Moment had been published in 1952 and was immediately promoted to classic status. But Frank was otherwise reacting against Cartier-Bresson, of whom he once said: 'you never felt he was moved by something that was happening other than the beauty of it, or just the composition.' And Frank was in general suspicious of a photographic practice rooted in photojournalism, 'those goddamned stories with a beginning and an end'. So he wasn’t looking for elegant compositions, and there’s little overt drama or conflict in The Americans. Instead of decisive moments, Frank depicts (in the words of Jno Cook) 'America stood still, frozen into a frightful pose between moments'. Papageorge expands on what this means in practice:
The characteristic gestures in his pictures are the slight, telling motions of the head and upper body: a glance (19, 37 [Papageorge refers here to page numbers in the first edition, though my Steidl reprint is unpaginated]), a stare (15, 41), a hand brought to the face (31, 51, 53), an arched neck (17, 55), pursed lips (15, 31). They suggest that Frank, like Evans, believed significance in a photograph might be consonant with the repose of the things it described.
One of Cartier-Bresson’s standard techniques was to identify a promising location or background, and then wait there for something interesting to happen – for a dynamic element to appear, and to interact with and play off the carefully arranged background, as in the image below, from 1932.
There’s little sense of Frank doing this. Where his compositions do seem superficially similar to Cartier-Bresson’s, as in the image of the naval recruitment office, it feels more like genuine happenstance. Perhaps he was interested in the flag, and the shoes were either there already, or arrived serendipitously. It’s difficult to imagine him hovering around the doorway waiting, not least because while one may anticipate the arrival of a bicycle (or a car, or a pedestrian) on a street, one would never imagine the shoes in advance.
The French title of The Decisive Moment was Images à la Sauvette, on the fly, the French idiom referred to a street peddler without a license, like the bag-sellers in Venice. And that original title perhaps suits Frank’s book better than it does Cartier-Bresson’s, even if Frank had arranged access in advance to several of his locations – but then many of Cartier-Bresson’s images were borrowed from photojournalistic assignments, something that is more obvious from the selection in The Decisive Moment than in subsequent best-of anthologies.
There are other differences. Many of Cartier-Bresson’s images aspire to a quality of lightness or grace. Frank’s images are heavy. Even by the looser standards of photojournalism, let alone those of fine-art photography, the reproductions sometimes appear underexposed. Presumably shot on the fastest available films (probably with a speed of only ISO200), many were likely push-processed. Some have poor tonal separation and poor acutance (sharpness or edge definition). The textures of objects are sometimes visible – e.g. the silk (?) protective cover draped over a Long Beach car, and the wool suit and barbered nape of a man on a ferry – but they have to compete with the texture of the medium, i.e. visible, intrusive film grain.
Incidentally, this image is one of my favourites in The Americans, for the line of hats and the intimacy with which the boy is pressed in against what I take to be his father’s back, ensuring physical contact even as each of them are absorbed in their own thoughts. But again this is not a dramatic gesture – it's hardly a gesture at all.
Frank’s aesthetic follows inevitably from the decision to use only available light and shoot in poorly lit interiors. In other words, Frank insisted on making his photographs depict the things and places he was interested in, even under conditions where other photographers would just have given up and gone home. Muddy is the word that comes to mind: not only for the tones, but for the sense that the world is full of inertia and resistance, so that existence is something you have to wade through and struggle against, and not just with a camera.
If I have reservations about Frank's approach, it’s with regard to the images without people. The rough tonalities, dead shadows and blown highlights of the small negative seem less justified when there’s no ephemeral human element that demands to be captured on the fly. But presumably for Frank consistency was more important than Evans’s variety. Don’t muck about: master one approach, one camera, one lens.
Like American Photographs, The Americans has one image per spread, so that each photograph is first seen in isolation as an independent visual statement before one is tempted to consider its relation to others in the sequence. And the titles are similarly minimalist, although here they are displayed opposite the images instead of separately at the end. The original French publication of the book juxtaposed the images with texts excerpted from a variety of commentators on America from various epochs, sourced and chosen by an editor, but thankfully these were removed for the American edition. Frank’s position has always been that a photograph should ‘nullify explanation’: that is, its effect should be primarily visual, untranslatable into language. The titles are therefore often limited to a bare statement of geography; sometimes they also specify the type of location or a social context ('Cocktail party – New York City', 'View from hotel window – Butte, Montana'), but they almost never attempt to describe or label the individuals depicted, so we are left to make our own inferences about the relationships between them. (An exception to this is 'Jehovah's Witness – Los Angeles', but since the man is visibly engaged in distributing copies of the movement's newspaper Awake, he's effectively labelling himself. Also the image on a ferry shown above is titled 'Yom Kippur – East River, New York City', which in effect identifies its subjects as Jewish, as otherwise it would not be relevant that it was taken on the Day of Atonement.)
The Americans is certainly arranged as a sequence. There are many pointed transitions: e.g. from an older man standing alone under the stairs of a Los Angeles rooming house to another on a bench at Yale wistfully watching a line of new students in black filing past; from a pair of hitchhikers driving Frank's car to another car zooming past in the background behind a bench of sedentary Florida pensioners, followed by another car draped with a protective silk cover, then a victim of a road accident draped with a blanket, which is in turn followed by a luminous shot of an empty highway receding into the distance. Or the kneeling supplicant holding a rudimentary cross by the Mississippi, which is then followed by a silhouetted statue of St Francis holding a cross up to bless a Los Angeles road intersection, and then a shaft of sunlight illuminating three crosses marking the site of a road accident, followed by an interior of a Detroit car-factory assembly line. As Badger explains, the flow is looser and more recursive than it is in American Photographs, frequently doubling back on itself:
Ideas ebb and flow, are introduced, discarded, recapitulated, transfigured, transposed, played off and piled up against each other with the exuberant energy and precise articulation of a Charlie Parker saxophone solo. (247)
Perhaps the larger rhythm of recurrent motifs and themes, with the book split into 'chapters', each introduced with an image of the American flag, is overall more important than specific transitions from one image to the next. We might say the same of much of American Photographs, but Frank's sequence retains both its variety and its coherence throughout, without succumbing to the repetitiveness that arguably undermines the latter part of Evans’s work.
We could perhaps describe Evans as Apollonian – characterised by sobriety and lucid description – and Frank as Dionysian – characterised by passionate intensity. Certainly the introduction by Kerouac fits this description, and also seems well-suited to the visual aesthetic. But I don't see The Americans as a work of intoxication. Frank’s response to the scenes he photographs is his alone – with very few exceptions, he doesn't share himself with anyone he depicts. So if there's a loss of self involved it is, as with van der Elsken, in the form of a kind of erasure rather than an ecstatic communion with the world(s) depicted. But unlike in the work of Brassaï and van der Elsken, none of these images are collaborations with the subjects – nor do they seem directed or stage-managed (with the possible exception of the image of the three trans people on both counts). And whereas for the earlier photographers, subcultures constitute a genuine alternative to the mainstream, a parallel and independent mode of existence, many of Frank’s subjects seem more marginal. Partly this is because Brassaï and van der Elsken photograph their worlds from close up, whereas Frank catches them in passing.
Evans found it difficult, if not impossible, to match the achievement of American Photographs. Frank didn’t even try to match The Americans, shifting his artistic aspirations to filmmaking shortly after the book's publication. Though perhaps this usual summation of his career is too simple: he continued to work as a photographer for hire, or so I infer from a famous anecdote by Joel Meyerowitz, whose own career as a photographer was inspired by watching Frank do a shoot for the ad agency where Meyerowitz worked in 1962. Indeed there's plenty of evidence online showing him doing commercial work much later than this. But he didn't publish this work in books.
