Photographic Inspirations: Atget's Seven Albums by Molly Nesbit

Eugène Atget (1857–1927) is the earliest of the photographic influences for Push Process, both in the sense of his place within photographic history and in the sense that my protagonist is first inspired to pick up a camera by Walter Benjamin’s famous aphorism: Not for nothing have Atget’s photographs been likened to the scene of a crime. But is not every square inch of our cities the scene of a crime? Every passer-by a culprit? I’m discussing him last because he never published a photobook, and his reputation is largely posthumous, in large part due to the efforts of the photographer Berenice Abbott, who acquired half of Atget’s archive of glass-plate negatives after his death.

I recently acquired a seminal work on Atget’s professional practice: Molly Nesbit’s Atget’s Seven Albums, published in 1992 by Yale University Press. What follows is a review/discussion of Nesbit's book, and some thoughts inspired by it.

What did Atget photograph? The historical and monumental traces of French and Parisian culture, with priority given to collective and anonymous achievements; also, a great deal of contemporary economic activity, and the culture associated with it (as we'll see below, this might include shop fronts, kiosks and so on, or the dwelling places and places of work for specific categories of worker); also some rural landscapes and natural phenomena (e.g. trees), the last category because of their assumed interest for artists. Much of the historical subject matter was grouped together in the contemporary imagination under the heading of 'Old Paris'. Museums and libraries were interested in records of Old Paris; so were antiquarians and amateur historians. Some of the economic activity Atget photographed also fell within this field: old shop signs, for example, or traditional, itinerant street traders. But even within this larger field, Atget's was a selective vision. Waldemar George noted in 1930 that he 'disdains panoramic views, grand syntheses, and synoptic tableaus' (quoted in Nesbit, 18), and Nesbit expands on this:

Atget's documents put forward a popular Paris, without the high life, without the reveries of an ancien régime, without the bourgeoisie. His Paris was a mass of common detail. ... the small shopkeeper and the worker on the street are given pride of place. (5, 6)

Encountering Atget’s archive unmediated is however a dispiriting experience. For example the MOMA collection (this is where the Abbott material is now held) is available online, and its contents are displayed in strictly chronological order on the MOMA website, beginning roughly in 1898 – Atget was a late starter as a photographer, after previous careers as a merchant seaman and an actor. If this collection feels unedited, containing images of highly variable quality, that’s because it’s really equivalent to looking at Atget’s contact sheets. All the images are in fact literally contact prints: Atget used a large-format 8x10-inch camera and didn’t enlarge any of his images (or at least did so very rarely), but instead created them using printing-out paper exposed by sunlight directly through the negative. But it should also be noted that reviewing the MOMA archive is not like looking at, for example, Robert Frank’s 35mm contact sheets, some of which you can find in Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans. Atget’s large-format camera didn’t allow for the kind of loose, casual experimentation in sequence through multiple exposures that rolls of 35mm film do. And although there are in fact numerous instances of hm taking multiple exposures of the same subject from different angles, or returning to the same spot on different occasions (sometimes years apart), his method was not to work through successive exposures towards the perfect crystallisation of a scene; still less was he in search of a decisive moment in which unstable, fleeting elements were in balance.

Atget was surely aware that some of his plates were more effective pictorial statements than others, but their primary purpose was to be of use to his customers. In other words, while some of them were more successful than others as photographs, few of them were treated as failures by Atget or discarded, because the subjects were more important than his images of them. And so long as they pointed effectively towards those subjects, they were adequate. When presenting prints to potential customers, Atget grouped them in themed albums, but these were not permanent compilations, and were akin to a catalogue, updated regularly. It’s not clear to me if one of the principles of these updates was to supplant inferior views of particular subjects with later, improved iterations, but even if Atget sometimes did this, he didn’t do it systematically.

Atget’s influence has therefore mainly been via selections of his work edited posthumously by others according to their own interpretations of his significance – and written commentary on his work was crucial from the start for determining its wider reception. In the first instance, this meant the book produced by Abbott in 1930: Atget: Photographe de Paris, with (in its French and English editions) an introduction by Pierre MacOrlan. Benjamin’s remarks on Atget, along with some similarly influential commentary by Walker Evans, were based on this book. By contrast, I primarily encountered Atget through the Phaidon 55 on him, published in 2001, edited by and with commentary from Gerry Badger.

All of Atget’s editors were in fact doing something similar to what his original customers did during his lifetime: putting together their own collections of his work according to their own predilections. These customers included artists – he famously described his practice as producing ‘documents for artists’ – illustrators, set designers, craftsmen, builders, architects, antiquarians, and above all several institutional libraries in Paris (also occasionally the V&A in London). For both Atget and his clients, his photographs:

were meant to refer beyond themselves, to be taken up repeatedly, to have several futures, and to exist as a point of detail on the way to one of them. They were meant to be incomplete. (35)

Most of his customers acquired multiple prints, and many of the libraries he sold to bought several hundred over the course of his career, which he or they might bind into albums, though not necessarily labelled with his name; and libraries might also mix his photographs with images on related subjects by others.

Nesbit's book is therefore of particular interest because the title refers to bound collections of images arranged by Atget, six of which he sold as integral albums to the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they were entered in the catalogue under his name as author and editor. Nesbit presents all the images from these albums in their original order, along with a seventh album that Atget also prepared, but failed to sell, and she analyses their contents within Atget’s larger practice and body of work. In doing so, she is concerned with an apparent contradiction: Atget’s description of his work as providing ‘documents for artists’, together with his disclaimer to Man Ray when the Surrealists wanted to use examples of his work as illustrations of the way unconscious energies animated the everyday: ‘Don’t put my name on it. These are simply documents I make.’ In fact, in other contexts Atget was quite happy to receive a named credit when his images were published as illustrations (as they often were), not least because that might increase his future sales, so one assumes he was specifically dubious about being associated with the Surrealists. In any case, how are we to square this with the description on his business card of ‘Author-Editor’ (the latter word can mean publisher as well as editor in French)? Nesbit sets out to explain precisely what it meant for Atget to create documents as an author and publisher: that is, she considers these terms in their contemporary cultural and legal contexts. 

Atget's Seven Albums is clearly based on years of exhaustive research into the photographer’s papers and images, along with supporting investigations in French records and archives. Nesbit is insistent throughout that the key to understanding Atget is not to be found in treating him as an artist, which was not a synonym for author. He did not see himself as an artist, and nor did any of his customers. And that fact does not diminish or belittle his very real achievements.

This insistence has a wider significance for me. I am a photographer, and I prefer the work of other photographers. I mean that I am suspicious of those who situate themselves as artists first and photographers second. To give some specific examples: I prefer Gabriele Basilico to Thomas Struth; Robert Adams to Ed Ruscha; Atget to the Bechers. The primary orientation of photography should be towards the world, not the art market. I don’t need the word ‘artist’ to justify or dignify my work as a photographer, and Atget is the patron saint of this attitude. (This is about the primary orientation of the work: it doesn’t preclude making money from it or showing it in galleries, though I think it does preclude selling NFTs.)

In several cases, Nesbit is able to demonstrate how specific clients of Atget used particular images as references for their paintings and illustrations. She’s also able to show how images were used as illustrations in their own right in published works by others, with or without credit to Atget – though even with credit the photographs are never treated as anything other than transparent depictions of their subjects. However, the primary interest of Nesbit’s book is in presenting a selection of Atget’s work in terms dictated by the man himself, intended for posterity. The titular seven albums represent only a small fragment of the work Atget created, and his choice to present them as integral collections was dictated partly by opportunity, but they nonetheless show his creative intelligence at work as an editor of his own work.

The albums were all created in the years immediately preceding the First World War (the last was actually edited and presented to the library during the War, but the images were taken in 1913). They are on the following subjects:

Art in Old Paris [L’Art dans le Vieux Paris] 

Parisian Interiors / Early Twentieth Century / Artistic / Picturesque & Bourgeois [Intérieurs Parisiens Debut du XXe Siècle Artistiques Pittoresques & Bourgeois] 

Vehicles in Paris [La Voiture à Paris] 

Trades, shops and shop displays of Paris [Métiers, boutiques et étalages de Paris] 

Signboards and old shops of Paris [Enseignes et vieilles boutiques de Paris] 

Inhabitants of the Zone [Zoniers] 

Fortifications of Paris [Fortifications de Paris]

Art in Old Paris: The first album is the least successful, in every respect, but it is the most fully worked up as an object. It was prepared on Atget's instructions by a printer as a maquette with typeset captions, since Atget hoped to have it published as a book. Nesbit explains the likely reasons why he failed: 

L'Art dans le Vieux Paris provided evidence, concrete evidence of Atget's defects, evidence of how habitually he had come to fidget within the regulation forms of the document, angling his perspectives more than necessary, not always aiming for perfect symmetry, making heavy contrast and uneven lighting his trademarks, allowing traces of later historical time to appear. Repeatedly we see doors left open, signs posted, horse manure in the streets.

Atget lost respectability with the Vieux Parisiens because of these kinds of details. He had not distinguished sufficiently between past achievement and modern debasement. No condemnation of the modern signboard, for instance, was made in the captions, no reference to the crashing incomprehension of the modern bourgeois culture that would sacrifice its past in the name of progress and profit. No effort to suppress or retouch the details of common life like carts and brooms and invocations to wipe one's feet please before climbing the stairs. (110)

Indeed, when Atget’s images were used as illustrations in books by others on Old Paris, Nesbit shows how they were retouched and/or cropped to exclude the details she singles out here (people, carts, etc.).

His captions for this maquette were far more detailed than usual, and even offer some anodyne aesthetic judgements ('remarkable', 'very beautiful'), but they were mostly cribbed from a guidebook: Nesbit also shows that they were sometimes erroneous, which would have been fatal for the book’s reception with an antiquarian audience.

‘Art’ in this album is really the work of craftsmen: that is, the decorative arts and architecture, not painting, although the album includes depictions of sculpture. But, although Nesbit identifies a logic of sorts in this presentation, to me it feels like a pretty random compendium of these historical traces, with a little of everything but no systematic account of anything, and it doesn’t really play to Atget’s strengths. Even though this maquette was neither published nor acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale, that institution signalled it would be receptive to other work presented in a similar format, which Atget duly provided.

Parisian Interiors / Early Twentieth Century / Artistic / Picturesque & Bourgeois: Atget's work is sometimes compared to Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, which I discussed in a previous post, but there’s a lot of crossover with Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as well. For example, Benjamin discusses the bourgeois interior, of the sort depicted in this album, which is about the relationship between culture and economy. These are unusual images for Atget, for whom negotiating access to interiors was no doubt extra work, which would have necessitated ingratiating himself with the occupants, and again the survey is less systematic than the title implies. For example, Atget’s own home appears three times, attributed each time to a different fictional occupant and occupation. In the first instance, he is ‘un’artiste dramatique’: this is not in fact a lie, since 'actor' remained his official occupation for several years after he began his photographic practice, and he continued in this line of work until c. 1910. In its last phase, his acting work seems to have consisted primarily of recitations of plays for working-class audiences attending night-school classes.

Nesbit contends that this album demonstrates Atget’s class consciousness by ironically juxtaposing interiors from wealthy occupants with more modest ones, but to me viewing these a century after the images were taken the similarity of the décor is more striking: that is, the more modest interiors seem to aspire to the same aesthetic as the wealthier ones. All the rooms are very cluttered; many have framed prints on the walls. Indeed, Nesbit quotes a contemporary writer, Léon Werth, who also made this point in 1910:

One sees the same furniture everywhere, in the ministries, in the bourgeois homes, in the workers' homes, in the brothels. The salon of le grand 16 resembles the boss's office: the same armchairs, same consoles, same carpets, same Diane de Falguières. An epoch without style? But it all holds together, goes together: stamped furniture from Saint-Antoine and paste jewels from the rue de la Paix. (120)

I know Atget primarily used a wide-angle lens, but I don’t know how wide: my guess would be a 180mm (roughly equal to a 28mm on a 35mm camera). In any case, while this worked fine for external views of architecture, where one usually had the option of taking a step backwards, it wasn’t quite wide enough for some of these views, which sometimes feel a little cramped or awkwardly cropped. I also don’t know if he used flash, but my guess would be no on the basis of the lighting patterns.

Vehicles in Paris: this is an almost comically matter-of-fact survey of carts, carriages and trams, with all the images framed fairly tightly (that is, although there are background details, here they don’t interact in an interesting way with the ostensible subjects). There are no motor cars: these occasionally appear in other Atget images, but, with the possible exception of the trams, everything here is horse-drawn – though the horses themselves are often cropped or absent, since Atget had to photograph stationary examples, so it was more convenient if they were parked. The effect is a little like one of Ed Ruscha’s books of gas stations or parking lots, though Atget's subjects feel closer to the world of the craftsman, simply because most of the vehicles are made of wood. And of course Atget’s intention was quite different to Ruscha's: not to illustrate the idea of taxonomy, but actually to be taxonomic. Ruscha is purposefully useless: Atget always intends to be useful. I wonder for whom these images might still be useful? Set designers for historical dramas perhaps – Atget’s original customers also included such people, though probably not in the case of this album, since they would not have needed to re-create contemporary vehicles. It's a measure of Nesbit's skill as a critic that she's able to identify a coherent vision of society, class and modernity from this unlikely subject matter:

Bicycles and automobiles were not at all involved in Atget's sample: there was a decided lack of pretty or family carriages, the kind of transport most associated with bourgeois life in town. ... Instead the album began with the lower orders of delivery tricks and migrants' trailers, interspersing the occasional taxi-cab but nonetheless remaining at the level of the working class of vehicle through most of its duration. Milk trucks, coal trucks, delivery trucks for Suze, paddy wagons, asphalt mixers, garbage trucks specializing in the kind of waste tactfully called mud. It paid special attention at one point to moving vans, distinguished from one another by the tenant's terme, the quarterly period by which rents were calculated and paid. This was the view of modern transportation. By any account it avoided much of what was considered modern.

Atget cut the voiture from its normal ties to modernity, from the promotional line of the "latest model" and from the concept of traffic. Time was cut off at the present. Traffic had no place. (126)

Trades, shops and shop displays of Paris: As Nesbit points out, the images here are mainly of shop displays, with only a couple of interiors. Some of Atget’s most famous images depict shop windows and mannequins, but most of those date from the 1920s. In all cases, Atget's examples are not artful displays in department stores, which are in fact deliberately excluded. Rather, this album depicts open-air displays, often on tables set up on the pavement in front of shops, or market stalls, many selling food (vegetables, fish). Similarly, there are also plenty of kiosks (for newspapers or flowers). In other words, the featured businesses mostly sell to customers walking past on the street, and they form part of the life of the street. Their goods are not encountered as spectacle, separated from viewers behind glass, but are experienced with other senses besides sight: smell and touch.

Admittedly not everything here fits this pattern. The album also includes a few cabaret or brasserie facades, along with one brothel entrance, and a few interiors: of two different wine merchants, a potter, a bookbinder – and Atget’s own desk advertised as the place of work of a photographer. The inclusion of this last means it’s not fanciful to suggest that Atget identified his own work with the other economic activities depicted here. Certainly he also mainly worked in the street (MacOrlan: 'Atget was a man of the street, an artisan poet of the Paris crossroads').

Nesbit argues convincingly that this album shows Atget constructing his own distinctive vision of Paris, and working against established traditions to do it:

This Paris was neither particularly vieux nor particularly gay. Atget was isolating a third city, a city that wore neither its heart nor its mores on its sleeve, and perhaps because of this it seemed  unsettled, contorted, plagued by a persistent, whistling ostranenie. (132)

We are given to look at these pictures from the ungainly position of the shopper, and even more specifically, the working-class shopper.

The viewer of the album was plunged into the one commcercial world that did not exist for the sole purpose of serving bourgeois need ... (160)

Signboards and old shops of Paris: This is back in Old Paris territory, since many of the shop signs and metal grills shown here were historical (or certainly the names were; many of the signs were likely nineteenth century). But the treatment here is more successful than the first album, even if seemingly quite modest in scope and ambition (Nesbit has more interesting things to say about this album than I have space to summarise here).

Inhabitants of the Zone: The last two albums are the most interesting. The ‘Zone’ was an area outside the city walls of Paris where permanent structures were forbidden. Originally this prohibition was for the purposes of military defence: I imagine to leave clean fields of fire beyond the city’s outlying fortifications. The disastrous outcome of the Franco–Prussian War of 1870–1, during which Paris had been occupied, had revealed the obsolescence of this provision, but it hadn’t been repealed. So although the Zone had many inhabitants, they lived in nominally temporary accommodation. 

This album concentrates on a particular group of Zoniers: the chiffoniers, or rag-pickers, whose activities were an integral part of the daily rubbish disposal and recycling process in Paris, where they had the right to collect and sort certain kinds of material (glass, metal, cloth, etc.). Atget’s photographs show the caravans and shacks where they both lived and worked, along with several depots or intermediate businesses where the sorted rubbish was collected before being fed back into the city’s economy. He doesn’t however provide any detailed captions for any of this, so we are reliant on Nesbit’s commentary for making sense of what we see, and more broadly for understanding the place of the chiffoniers within French culture and the Parisian economy. 

The ragpickers themselves appear intermittently, usually paused from their work, sometimes a little blurred by the long exposure: that is, Atget doesn’t attempt to depict their activities directly for the most part, still less to make candid portraits. But these are fascinating and powerful pictures, which Nesbit convincingly argues have a political subtext. They certainly lack the kind of comforting framing of Paris After Dark, in which the captions assert that everything and everyone has a place, and therefore everything is as it should be.

Fortifications of Paris: This album also depicts the Zone, but here concentrating on the undeveloped scrubland directly abutting the walls and defences. This unstructured space was very different to the urban locations Atget normally photographed, which had been densely settled and occupied and redeveloped over hundreds of years. 

My earlier comparison between the vehicles album and Ed Ruscha was a little facetious, but here the images genuinely do seem to anticipate the New Topographics trend of the 1970s and 80s, and in particular Lewis Baltz’s projects on San Quentin Point and Candlestick Point from the 1980s, which similarly depict degraded semi-rural environments just outside the city limits. Most of Atget’s images in this album do show aspects of the city defences, but often the fortifications are relegated to the background, and the foreground is instead filled with uncultivated brownfields, which are punctuated with semi-official or desire paths trod out by regular city visitors. These compositions often focus on trees as organising features. 

There are also several images of railway tracks and junctions, which exited Paris at several points, or of culverts where polluted water trickled out. Many of the images are quite abstract, for example the one reproduced above, which works as a series of slashing diagonals and v-shapes. In a body of work so obsessed with the accumulated traces of culture and history, these images are quite startlingly different.

Although Nesbit’s book is in many ways an exemplary academic study, it has some issues worth mentioning. As with most humanities writing from the 1990s, you need some tolerance for Foucault, although his The Archaeology of Knowledge is undeniably relevant for a study of a maker of documents for institutional clients. On the whole, this is a well-written book: it's clear and thorough when Nesbit needs to establish a point of fact; it's stylish and sophisticated when advancing an argument. But it does sometimes lapse into academic-ese, and there are a few too many sentences I found impossible to parse even after several readings. It sometimes has the typical academic habit of talking around a crucial point without ever trying to provide a clear definition, as if the question is too profound or complex to address directly. And on a related but different point, it doesn't always define its terms clearly. For example, the idea that Atget's images contain 'technical signs', a phrase that recurs constantly but is never defined. From the context it seems to mean something like 'the ostensible or apparent justification for the image's existence in relation to a particular, technical purpose', e.g. the inclusion of a shop sign in a street scene to enable its sale to an Old Paris specialist. But the clumsiness of this attempted definition itself illustrates the problem here.

It’s instructive to note how a study like this required a great deal of financial support to enable publication, but even with that support, the image reproduction is ... fine. It's good for this kind of book – actually, it's about the same as my book! – but it's inferior to the Steidl editions we've discussed previously, which use duotone or tritone printing. Here the paper seems to be coated, and the content of the images is reproduced accurately, but the printing is likely black ink only with a single pass through the press, which means the images come out a little flat, with thin blacks and crushed highlights. It does however have a huge number of illustrations, including large-scale reproductions of selected Atget images as figures accompanying the text, along with a wide variety of other visual sources for comparison. 

By contrast, the images from the seven albums are presented in appendices, four to a page: that is, much smaller than the actual negatives (and sometimes too small to make out the details mentioned in Nesbit’s commentary). They're also on a different paper stock, with a glossier coating, but the advantage of this is wasted because they're printed darker, which obliterates a lot of the shadow detail. But given how much is included here, and what an enormous labour of compilation and permissions it represents, it’s hard to resent the understandable compromises made in the book's production. Less forgivable is the reluctance to translate key passages from French: sometimes there’s a translation (even if confined to the endnotes), and sometimes there isn’t. People who aren’t fluent in French are interested in reading about Atget too!

This book is now out of print, and second-hand copies are expensive. As an alternative, I’d still recommend the Phaidon 55 on Atget by Gerry Badger, which is much smaller and cheaper second-hand than Atget's Seven Albums – especially since it’s now clear to me how much Badger’s image selection and commentary both draw on Nesbit's work.

As a final point, I'd note that, while I feel I understand Atget's work far better after reading this book, I'm not sure it will have much direct effect on my own photographic practice going forward. Whereas there are half a dozen phrases in Badger's commentary in the Phaidon 55 that I come back to again and again. E.g. 'the sense of space in an Atget image, even one describing an enclosed area, is usually expansive rather than restrictive, offering a choice of ways by which the viewer may enter or leave.' (Badger, 50)

Notes on Photography: The Outmoded

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.

Photographic Inspirations: The Phaidon 55 Series

‘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.

Inspirations: Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky

 

The clip above includes (from about 00:45) the final sequence in Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky, a (very) unorthodox biographical film about a fifteenth-century monk and icon painter in Russia. The action of the film directly dramatises selected scenes from Rublev's life in black-and-white, but after the action concludes, we enter this colour sequence, which consists of a series of slow tracking shots (interspersed with equally slow zooms and / or push-ins) over the painted surface of Rublev's surviving icons. This method of animating static paintings has become a cliche in TV documentaries about art, and Tarkovsky's production notes from 1962 indicate that it was already established as a convention even then.

In our film there will not be a single shot of Rublev painting his icons. He will simply live, and he won't even be present on-screen in all episodes. And the last part of the film (in colour) will be solely devoted to Rublev's icons. We will show them in detail (as in a popular scientific film). The on-screen demonstration of the icon will be accompanied by the same musical theme which sounded in the episode of Rublev's life corresponding to the time during which the icon was conceived [quotation taken from Robert Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 37].

In the colour sequence, the music fills the entire soundtrack and thereby assumes an importance that recalls the ending of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped: i.e. it seems to signal transcedence even as it literally emphasises immanence and materiality (the surface of the painting).

Robert Bird describes the significance of the colour coda to Andrei Rublev in the following terms (p. 10):

[It] consummates the halting narrative, retrospectively revealing its underlying logic and transforming its deep textures into glorious surfaces. However, the icon display also suspends the complex weave of dialogue, music and ambient sound in a pious supplication. In effect, it dissolves the film's heavy temporality in its eternal patterns, as if Tarkovsky was ceding authorship to St Andrei Rublev. Several of Tarkovsky's subsequent films end in a similar confusion of temporal and spatial planes, a feature which irks some viewers as an 'easy transcendence' of the characters' otherwise torturous progression across the dolorous earth. However, by extending his searching gaze into the transcendent plane, Tarkovsky is also raising the stakes of his aesthetic gamble. Instead of the certainty of faith, he contemplates the possibility that there can be no true ending, possibly no true story at all, under the weight of time [Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 10].

I first saw Andrei Rublev in about 1991. Its coda had a transfixing effect on me, and I have spent the twenty years since trying to re-enact this effect in one way or another. One of the immediate, enabling ideas it seemed to suggest was that the dialectic of realism vs. abstraction was a question solely of the scale of observation: that is, any image becomes abstract if you zoom in close enough; and any apparently flat surface is revealed to be sculpted if you blow it up large enough. I have therefore engaged in numerous attempts to photograph the surface of historical paintings in microscopic detail. Below are two attempts at this: close-ups of the surface of paintings from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, which are part of icon-like renditions of gold fabrics, in which imprinted abstract patterns achieve their effect by textural means.

In Five Wounds, Dan and I do something similar by isolating a fragment of Tintoretto's Paradise, and then translating it into a collage of abstract shapes of different colours, which are juxtaposed as if in an insane painting-by-numbers exercise. This exercise combines the literal and abstract within the same scale of representation: i.e. by means of a mosaic effect, it combines the perspective of the 'establishing shot', which shows the whole painting, with the isolation of particular details or fragments that characterises the close-up.

In the endpapers of the first edition of Five Wounds, this manipulated visual citation from Tintoretto was rendered even more abstract by being presented as a blown-up fragment of a fragment, thus:

Many icons are literally mosaics of course, and Tarkovsky compared the unusual structure of Andrei Rublev to that of a mosaic:

You can stick your nose into some fragment, beat it with your fist, and scream: 'Why is it black here? It shouldn't be black here! I don't like to look at black!' But you have to look at a mosaic from afar and on the whole, and if you change one colour the whole thing falls apart [quoted in Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 38].

The mosaic is an ancient pictorial technique, but the ending of Andrei Rublev is - despite its eschewal of dramatisation and mise-en-scene - intrinsically cinematic, or rather, photographic, because slow-motion and the close-up are both quintessentially photographic effects, which initiated a new way of looking at the world by giving us access to what Walter Benjamin called the optical unconscious. Photography also revolutionised the way we think about paintings, not only by making it easy to reproduce them, but also by making it easy to isolate details from them (and even, via X-rays, to analyse their constituent elements).

Five Wounds: Dogs

 

Dogs occupy a prominent and sinister role in Five Wounds, partly because of events in the autobiographical backstory to the novel. But there are other reasons for this canine presence. Dogs are ubiquitous in modern Venice, which is actually quite baffling given the lack of parks in the city. Hence Venetian streets are notoriously littered with dog shit, which no-one ever bothers to clean up. Considering this, I imagined a variation on Kipling's animal tales ('How the cat got his tail', 'How the camel got his hump', etc.), in which a child might ask her father, 'Why are there so many dogs in Venice, daddy, and why are they so spoilt?', and the answer might be, 'Well, daughter, once upon a time, the dogs ruled this city, and they still have their ancestral privileges, although they have no real power any more'.

Below I review a menagerie of fictional and literary dogs, many of whom were barking away down in my subconscious as I wrote. I am just listing the ones that come immediately to mind now as I write. I didn't ever make a comprehensive list, and I omit here several relevant examples already mentioned in Dan's post about the Black Dog.

The most explicit historical reference to dogs in Five Wounds is to a passage from the Hierogylphics of Horapollo, which is quoted by Crow in the chapter 'A Meeting of Minds', as follows (I may have tweaked the text slightly to fit the context; I don't have the original in front of me):

When the Egyptians wish to indicate a scribe, or a prophet, or an embalmer, or the spleen, or a judge, they draw the hieroglyph of a dog. A scribe, since he who wishes to become an accomplished scribe must bark continually and be fierce and show favours to none, just like dogs. And a prophet, because the dog looks intently beyond all other beasts upon the images of the gods, like a prophet. And an embalmer, because he looks upon the bodies which he has taken care of naked and dissected. And the spleen, since the dog alone among other animals has a very light spleen. If death of madness overcomes him, it happens because of his spleen. And a judge, because as the dog gazes intently upon the images of the gods, so the judge of ancient times contemplated the king in his nakedness.

Horapollo's treatise is a neo-Platonic interpretion of Egyptian hieroglyphs from the early Christian era. It was very influential in the Renaissance, but it is based upon almost entirely erroneous premises, a fact that was not proved conclusively until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the nineteenth century. Horapollo therefore fits the theme of interpretation / misinterpretation that runs through Five Wounds, which is why I was reading the treatise in the first place, but then I came across the passage on dogs, which could be made to fit my five protagonists.

Other dog references are less openly acknowledged, like the famous last line from Kafka's The Trial, 'Like a dog', which is quoted above in a comic-strip version of the novel, adapted by David Mairowitz and Chantal Montellier. The phrase is Joseph K.'s final reflection upon himself, and upon his treatment at the hands of the law, as the executioner's knife descends. Here the dog is a figure of the abject, of the pariah, who is excluded from human society, like the outlaw of medieval legend, whose figure is the wolf.

Several dogs in Dante's Inferno are rendered below in William Blake's illustrations. The first image is of the three-headed Cerberus, the guardian of the underworld from classical mythology (Dante's text, like Five Wounds, jumbles its mythological and historical frames of reference). In the Inferno, Cerberus torments the souls of the gluttonous, whose fate is elucidated in Dorothy L. Sayers' commentary, as follows (p. 107):

The Gluttonous: The surrender to sin which began with mutual indulgence leads by an imperceptible degradation to solitary self-indulgence. Of this kind of sin, the Gluttons are chosen as the image. Here is no reciprocity and no communication; each soul grovels alone in the mud, without heeding his neighbours - "a sightless company", Dante calls them. .... [Cerberus] is the image of uncontrolled appetite; the Glutton, whose appetite preyed upon people and things, is seen to be, in fact, the helpless prey on which that appetite gluts itself.



Later in the Inferno, Dante and Virgil travel through the Wood of the Suicides, in which the souls of the inhabitants are imprisoned in sterile trees. The trees cannot speak, unless their branches are broken, whereupon they bleed, and they can whistle through the coagulating blood, until it clots, when they are once again condemned to silence. Also trapped in the Wood of the Suicides are the Profligates, who run through it, pursued eternally by black dogs (aha!), and in fleeing, they tear the branches from the bleeding trees as they pass.



In the Inferno, dogs are therefore associated with the gluttonous and the profligate, and the latter group is also associated with suicide: All these ideas can also be linked to the theme of addiction.

At the beginning of the Inferno, dogs are also associated with avarice via the figure of one of the three beasts that terrify Dante in canto 1 (see illustration below): the She-Wolf, who can only be vanquished by the prophesied Greyhound, the Master-hound. Here is Sayers again on this image (p. 75):

The Beasts [Leopard, Lion and She-Wolf]: These are the images of sin. They may be identified with Lust, Pride, and Avarice respectively, or with the sins of Youth, Manhood, and Age; but they are perhaps best thought of as the images of the three types of sin .... The Greyhound has been much argued about. I think it has both an historical and a spiritual significance. Historically, it is perhaps the [p. 76] image of some hoped-for political saviour who should establish the just World-Empire. Spiritually, the Greyhound, which has the attributes of God (“wisdom, love, and power”), is probably the image of the reign of the Holy Ghost on earth – the visible Kingdom of God for which we pray in the Lord’s Prayer.



The following passage from Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 152, refers to Albrecht Durer's engraving of Melancholy (which features a sleeping - no doubt dreaming - dog), and which 'portrays the dangers of excessive study', a highly relevant theme for Gabriella and Crow:

One of the properties assembled around Durer's figure of Melancholy is the dog. The similarity between the condition of the melancholic, ... and the state of rabies, is not accidental. According to ancient tradition 'the spleen is dominant in the organism of the dog'. This he has in common with the melancholic. If the spleen, an organ believed to be particularly delicate, should deteriorate, then the dog is said to lose its vitality and become rabid. In this respect it symbolizes the darker aspect of the melancholy complexion. On the other hand the shrewdness and tenacity of the animal were borne in mind, so as to permit its use as the image of the tireless investigator and thinker. 'In his commentary on this hieroglyph Piero Valeriano says explicitly that the dog which "faciem melancholicam prae se ferat" [bears a melancholy face] would be the best at tracking and running'. In Durer's engraving [of Melancholy], especially, the ambivalence of this is enriched by the fact that the animal is depicted asleep: bad dreams come from the spleen, but prophetic dreams are also the prerogative of the melancholic.

 

Coincidentally, Dan also discusses Durer's Melancholy in relation to another illustration for Five Wounds, although it was not a reference that either of us ever mentioned to each other.

Another source I came across in the British Library in 2006, while I was researching Goya, is an English translation by Abraham Fleming of a Latin treatise by Johannes Caius, On English Dogs, first published in 1576. The following passage is from p. 17:

Of the dog, called the Thievish dog; in Latin, Canis furax.

The like to that whom we have rehearsed, is the Thievish Dog, which at the mandate and bidding of his master fleereth and leereth in the night: hunting conies by the air, which is leavened with their savour; and conveyed to the sense of smelling by the means of the wind blowing towards him. During all which space of his hunting he will not bark, lest he should be prejudicial to his own advantage. And thus watching and snatching in course as many conies as his master will suffer him; and beareth them to his master’s standing. The farmers of the country, and uplandish dwellers, call this kind of dog a Night Cur; because he hunteth in the dark.

I took one of the running heads in Five Wounds from this passage: 'Leavened With Their Savour'. Interpreted in the context of the novel, this passage might also be a way of linking the character of Cur, the dog-man, to that of Magpie, the nocturnal thief.

Finally, the barking of dogs represents the idea of non-sense or 'noise' (as opposed to 'signal' in information theory), as in the following passage from A. S. Byatt's Babel Tower, in which an expert witness testifies in court during an obscenity trial that serves as the novel's climax. The book on trial here is Babbletower, an allegory written by one of the characters within Byatt's novel, excerpts of which interrupt the frame narrative, along with several other competing, interpolated texts:

Well, let us start with the title. La Tour Bruyarde translates as the noisy, or shouting, or howling tower – the word ‘bruyard’ suggests the noise made by hound dogs. It is an image of the Tower of Babel which was constructed to displace God from Heaven, and was punished for its presumption by having a spirit of discord sent amongst its members, so that their languages were confused, they could no longer understand each other.

The Novelist and the Storyteller

The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled, and cannot counsel others.

From The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin 

Benjamin was distinguishing the novelist from the 'storyteller', by which he meant someone participating in an oral culture: that is, someone linked to their audience by direct physical contact, for whom storytelling is a bodily performance. I think that the growth of online culture has, ironically (given that all online communication is, by definition, mediated), taken us back to the age of the storyteller. It is impossible to flourish as a new writer now without communicating regularly and closely with one's audience: that is, without performing the role of author in public.

Bagpuss and Commodity Fetishism

The collector … makes his concern the transfiguration of things. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value.

Walter Benjamin

What is it that animates Bagpuss and his friends? Love.

Emily's shop doesn't sell anything, but only displays valueless objects lost by others. These lost objects include, implcitly, Bagpuss and his friends, who live in the shop window, and who, in each episode, interpret and repair a new object that Emily finds and brings to the shop:

The toys would discuss what the new object was; someone (usually Madeleine) would tell a story related to the object (shown in an animated thought bubble over Bagpuss's head), often with a song, ... and then the mice, singing in high-pitched squeaky harmony as they worked, would mend the broken object. The newly mended thing would then be put in the shop window, so that whoever had lost it would see it as they went past, and could come in and claim it.

Bagpuss is about the recovery of meaning through love. Love is a kind of fetishisation, but it acts as the antidote to commodity fetishisation. 

(I see I am not the first to give Bagpuss a quasi-Marxist reading. In mulling over this reading, I also had a go at connecting the moment of Bagpuss waking up to Benjamin's image of awakening into revolutionary consciousness from the nightmare of history, but I couldn't quite make that idea work.)

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Review from History Australia

The following is another archive review of Pistols! Treason! Murder!, by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, from History Australia 5.1 (2008):

REVIEW OF JONATHAN WALKER’S PISTOLS!
TREASON! MURDER! THE RISE AND FALL OF A
MASTER SPY, MONOGRAPH AND WEBSITE

According to Iain McCalman, Jonathan Walker’s Pistols! Treason! Murder! is the ‘first true work of “punk history”’. If what is meant by ‘punk history’ is carefully stage-managed historiographical defiance, McCalman’s description is apt. At first sight, the focal point of Pistols! Treason! Murder! is Gerolamo Vano, a self-fashioned Venetian ‘general of spies’ whose life unravelled into a noose in 1622. A closer look at the text and its accompanying website, though, reveals that the work is as much about Walker’s ways of composition and historiography as it is about the shaping and pathology of self in seventeenth-century Venice.

Walker’s acknowledged sources of historiographical inspiration include Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, microhistories ranging from Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre to McCalman’s The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro and Walter Benjamin’s unfinished posthumous work, The Arcades Project. Chief among these sources perhaps is The Arcades Project, for Pistols! Treason! Murder! has the form of an apparently random series of quotations, observations, notes and interviews. Between chapters 16 to 20, for instance, we pass from excerpts from the chief source of information about Vano – file 636 in the Venetian archives – to an analysis of the meaning of ‘honour’ in seventeenth-century Venice, to the purported transcript of a conversation between Walker and two other historians in an Irish pub, to Walker’s testing of Vano’s geography from a report dated 10 April 1622 and eight possible readings of it, to a comparison of the material fabric of Venice with the chief archival sources.

The ‘arcades’ flavour of the book is reinforced by the related website, which offers browsers information on the historiographical and popular cultural sources for Walker’s writing – including songs by Johnny Cash and The Afghan Whigs – vivid colour pictures of the textures of Venice and most usefully, ‘deleted scenes’. The ‘deleted scenes’ include the papers Walker published on the project prior to the book, and excluded chapters on the spy as flaneur and intellectual history. These segments of the website, in combination with the marvellous central image by Hallett of the project as a tree of knowledge – and even temptation, given the representation of the link to file 636 as an apple – and the flip book sequence in chapter 28 of the book show that Walker’s project is as much a homage to and revisitation of visual as well as print culture.

Readers more accustomed to the conventional arrangement of biographical material according to a chronological or thematic scheme may find the book and accompanying website jarring. That, Walker would probably insist, is a good thing, for Vano’s activities cannot be rendered coherent. Archival gaps will not allow it, but moreover, as Walker claims:

Each story in Vano’s reports contains or opens up the possibility of another
that undoes or reverses it. Each collapses as a direct consequence of attempts
to shore it up. No possible scenario accounts for everything. As I read the reports,
I ‘crashed’ repeatedly: irretrievable error; the system has shut down. I
could not leave Vano alone, but he offered no answers to any questions that a
respectable historian might want to ask. Instead he demanded a more daring
and radical response, in which obsession itself becomes a strategy (p. 7).

This quote is important, for it highlights the differences between Pistols! Treason! Murder! and The Arcades Project. Many commentators have noted that Benjamin’s Project can be arranged and rearranged, and read and re-read in any number of different ways. Almost entirely absent from Benjamin’s Project are the motifs that individuals use to connect and therefore render their experiences meaningful. In Pistols! Treason! Murder!, there are at least three meaning-makers: Vano, Walker and the illustrator Dan Hallett. The Vano of Pistols! Treason! Murder! is engrossing and somewhat akin to the character of Tony Wilson in 24-Hour Party People, ascribing, erasing and re-ascribing meaning to peoples’ actions in order to place himself in a past that delivers respect and financial reward. In his world, a cough might signal betrayal and the promise of recognition and reward. Or it might simply be a cough. We can never be sure. The patterns of Vano’s rhetoric are intriguing, but ultimately only hinted at in the text. As Richard Evans noted in Kneipengespräche im Kaiserreich, the rhetorical form of intelligence reports is an important part of their meaning, not an obstacle to a ‘real’ individual. A closer look at Vano’s language, and the comparative analysis of other informants might suggest a more conventional individual than we can currently see.

Arguably, Walker is sketched in more depth than Vano: literally in graphic-novel illustrations provided by Dan Hallett and figuratively in his self reflections on his ‘obsession’ with Vano. Early on, for instance, he eschews Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties in favour of the multiple typefaces pioneered in works like Richard Price’s Alabi’s World. In so doing, he affirms a world in which boundaries between fact and fiction and primary and secondary sources matter. Moreover, the historiographical metaphors that he employs – the historian as pathologist and psychic – are now quite conventional and in the latter case, rest upon the problematic reading of historical understanding as an epistemological rather than conceptual activity. Has he, like the protagonist of the Radiohead song, 2+2=5 (the title for chapter 23 of Pistols! Treason! Murder!) succumbed to historiographical ‘doublethink’?

Even if the answer to that question is yes, Pistols! Treason! Murder! is still a stimulating and provocative read. It is punk history, but probably more in the tuneful style of The Jam than the manufactured chaos of The Sex Pistols.