DISAPPEARING WITNESS:
CHANGE IN 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY

Gretchen Garner
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003

[in print, available through booksellers, $34.95 ]

What follows is the introduction to the book, © Gretchen Garner: 

To speak about photography in general has become almost impossible.  The subject is too vast, the purposes too varied, the audiences too diverse to generalize. In its short history photography has become a virtually universally practiced means of communication with professional workers in every corner of the world.  Identification photos, news photos, evidence photos, advertising photos, and portrait photos are generated nearly everywhere, and in a surprising number of places worldwide artists too have added the camera to their standard battery of equipment.  Millions of amateurs the world over record their own personal snapshots as well.  How can one sort through this variety and volume?  Just as one narrows the field in writing to speak about fiction, poetry, or journalism, for example, in the midst of this visual glut—just to have a manageable subject—we usually focus on documentary, landscape, fashion, fine art or portraiture, as particular practices among many others, in speaking of photography.

There are more than enough differences among the practices to obscure their common features.  The studio photographer, for example, works so differently from the photojournalist it seems they share only camera, film and light.  And even then, the equipment varies tremendously.  In the studio the photographer is likely to use a large view-camera and complex artificial lighting, while the newspaper or magazine photographer is likely to use a light 35-mm rangefinder camera and a portable flash.  What is more, the slower, analytical thinking required for studio work could hardly be more different from the quick-response activity of the journalist.

Nonetheless, this book will venture to generalize.  I will argue that there has been a general shift in the practice of American photography—many kinds of photography—over the last three decades.  This shift has been away from and preceded by a remarkable period, roughly from the nineteen-twenties through the ‘sixties, when a type of photography that emphasized chance, alert presence in the real world, and quick response was dominant in almost every kind of photographic practice.  I will argue that this way of photography, which I call spontaneous witness, was the underlying or meta-style uniting a surprising variety of approaches, and that although it does continue in subdued fashion, this way of engaging the world photographically is no longer dominant but rather is confined now largely to journalism or documentary work.  In fact, spontaneous witness continues more strongly outside than inside the United States, but that would be the subject of another book since my focus will be practice in the U.S.  Following the era of spontaneous witness, American photographers have turned to increasing control or else toward a hyper-consciousness of the syntax (and sometimes limitations) of the medium. 

Alert readers will think of exceptions as we go, and certainly in constructing this chronicle I will emphasize some things more than others, but I ask that you follow the argument to the end before deciding whether the exceptions overwhelm the path I will trace.  I don’t believe that they will.

The book will discuss some European photographers (and one Japanese), but primarily in connection with their influence on American practice, or because their work became well known in this country.  Although most of the material in the book is American, and the argument concerns practice in the United States, my emphasis is not as narrow as it might seem, because for most of the twentieth century photography has flourished most strongly in the United States, and the examples cited here will be generally familiar to an international audience.  The pattern revealed in the book, in any case, can also be found in photography outside the United States. 

It is important to understand the change photography has undergone. Unless we do, something valuable and unique may slip away without notice, and future, more cynical generations will not understand the incredibly vibrant cultural role photography played in mid-twentieth century.  It is certain that the role and practice of photography have changed; our task to note from what to what.

If we call these past hundred years the photographic century, few will argue.  Still and motion photography have been our most important tools of gathering information—from the crime scene to the orbiting satellite—and photography has been for most twentieth-century citizens the form in which they encounter visual images.  Still and motion photography have had different characteristic approaches, however.  Despite cinema’s documentary usefulness, motion pictures early in the century became primarily a story-telling, fictional medium.  Still photography did not, however—not, that is, until the last three decades.  It is clear now that still photographs can do a remarkable number of things and look a great number of ways: they can document events in real time and space or they can be works of contrived arrangement, and they can also be—as physical objects—painted-upon, distorted, and manipulated beyond their easy identification as camera-made images.   Looking back from, say, a hundred years in the future, it may turn out that the contrived, fictional mode will be seen to be the major trend of still photography as it has been in cinema.  It will be all the more surprising then that in our own time one broad style, spontaneous witness, has dominated all kinds of still photography for at least half of the photographic century. 

This style dominated, I believe, because it seemed the perfect medium for the kind of universal, everyman’s communication that had been dreamt of by the post-World War I revolutionaries, both political and artistic. It fit, for example, the revolutionary dream of universal class solidarity—photography was accessible to most people and a communication means that did not (or so it was thought) carry any baggage of style or history.   In a 1931 radio address August Sander averred that “Today with photography we can communicate our thoughts, conceptions, and realities, to all the people on earth….Even the most isolated Bushman could understand a photograph of the heavens—whether it showed the sun, the moon, or the constellations.”[1]  Even as late as 1968, photojournalist and founder of the International Center of Photography Cornell Capa could write that photography “is the most vital, effective and universal means of communication of facts and ideas between people and between nations.”[2]  For a long time, this seemed to be true to just about everyone. 

The heyday of spontaneous witness was the period of high modernism between the great wars and into the 1950s.  Its breakdown began in the 1960s when belief in the universal, and general faith in progress began to slip as ideals.  We will see below how serious photography began to turn to more private concerns, much of it to what MoMA Curator John Szarkowski called “mirrors” looking in, instead of “windows” looking out.[3]

In addition to the claims for universal communication that were made for photography, the fast cameras that were new in the nineteen-twenties were the perfect tools to capture the frenetic speed of a culture increasingly in motion (generally in the direction of “progress”) and increasingly glorifying the machine and the rational promises of science.  As well, the new style of clear-eyed spontaneous photography made the break with Pictorialist photography complete—those soft-focus, Tonalism-derived formulas of turn-of-the-century practice that by the ‘twenties were tired conventions.

Perhaps it was not only a perfect historical fit that allowed spontaneous witness to flourish, but also the ontological genius of the medium for this type of seeing.  Rudolf Arnheim observed in 1974 that “the snapshot quality of photographs manifests a unique character trait of the medium.  Photography does something unheard of when it catches motion in the act.”[4]  In other words, Arnheim argued that photography had not done anything truly new until the “snapshot,” or what I am calling spontaneous witness.  Arnheim posited two phases, so far, in the development of photography:

the early period during which the image, as it were, transcended the momentary presence of the portrayed objects because of the length of exposure and the bulkiness of the equipment; and the second phase, which exploited the technical possibility of capturing motion in a fraction of time.  The ambition of instantaneous photography…was that of preserving the spontaneity of action and avoiding any indication that the presence of the picture taker had a modifying influence on what was going on.

Nevertheless, Arnheim saw that something new was on its way beyond the second phase:

Characteristically enough, however, our own century has discovered a new attraction in the very artificiality of picture taking and endeavored to use it deliberately for the symbolic representation of an age that has fallen from innocence.  This stylistic trend has two main aspects: the introduction of surrealist apparitions, and the frank acknowledgment of photography as an exposure.[5]

In 1974, when Arnheim spotted it, this trend had only just begun to gather speed.  The “surrealistic apparitions” he mentioned were meager and rather simple set-ups or darkroom pastiches, compared the elaborate computer concoctions of today, and the “frank acknowledgment of photography as an exposure” has since his writing generated bookshelves of post-modern theory and affected every type of practice formerly dubbed “candid.”  While the computer culminates the trend away from the photography of witness, we will see below that in an “age that has fallen from innocence” other factors had been leading away from it since the 1960s.  But first, we will explore the dimensions of spontaneous witness itself.

Who were the great avatars of spontaneous witness?  A familiar cast of characters, they are the generally recognized masters of twentieth-century photography such as Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Richard Avedon (among many others).  These three, though, are not ordinarily considered in the same breath—a great landscapist, the 35-mm master, and a brilliant fashion/portrait stylist.  I choose them because of what they do have in common, indeed what makes them the great exemplars that they are, which is precisely this shared attitude of spontaneous witness, of being in the world, alert to time and change as it happens.  We will consider below the work of many photographers of Arnheim’s “second phase” and see that despite superficial differences, the great majority of them shared a deep, almost metaphysical belief that they could go to the heart of a moment in time and place without disturbing it, and uncover a new kind of visual truth.

This book will concern itself primarily with practice more than theory, and wherever possible it will be the ideas and the words of photographers themselves that serve as our primary documents.  As an historical account, all the changes in practice are situated within their times. Yet change, while necessary, cannot be predicted in its precise forms but depends on the unique visions of individuals.  New paradigms in practice emerge from the creative minds of the photographers themselves, not just from historical circumstance or the ideas of critics.  We can and must see these individuals in context, but without them, context itself doesn’t make change.

Because we are concerned here with change of practice in general, however, close and complete analyses of individual photographers will not be offered.  Thankfully there are many excellent histories and monographs available for that, and the reader is directed elsewhere for more complete views of individuals.  For my purposes, individual photographers will exemplify ideas, particularly change in ideas, but this in no way should be taken to diminish each one’s brilliance, range, or unique contributions.  Nor should lack of mention here suggest any individual’s unimportance.  The photographers I will discuss are prime exemplars, but there are many other brilliant photographers whose work has enriched our visual culture.  Indeed, many of the photographers who have given us all the most pleasure won’t be found here because their work has not been pivotal in the history I mean to trace.

The shape the book takes is roughly chronological—roughly, because any one chapter may discuss works that can be up to fifty years apart.  And yet the book is chronological in the sense that Part One: Photography of Witness lays out the parameters of practice from early in the century up to the nineteen-sixties, and Part Two: Disappearing Witness, while similarly broad-ranging, likewise concentrates on the various factors of change in practice since the ‘sixties.

Finally, I have written this book not just for a scholarly audience.  It is for photographers themselves and also general readers who know something about photography and have a lively interest in it as the most important visual medium of our time.  This will include, I trust, picture editors, art directors, museum-goers, serious amateurs, collectors, and students in the hundreds of college-level courses in the history and practice of photography that have burgeoned in the last thirty years, the very years of change that are the focus of attention in Part Two of the book.

1 - August Sander, “Photography as a Universal Language,” 1931, reprinted in Jerome Liebling, ed., Photography: Current Perspectives (Rochester:  Massachusetts Review/Light Impressions, 1978), 47.

2 - Cornell Capa, The Concerned Photographer (New York: Grossman, 1968), Introduction.

3 - John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 (New York: Museum of Modern Art/NY Graphic Society, 1978).

4 - Rudolf Arnheim, “On the Nature of Photography,” Critical Inquiry, 1, no. 1 (September 1974), 151.

5 - Ibid., 154.