Peter Marshall
The Camerawork Essays
(Abbreviated excerpts from a forthcoming review - the first half of which covers similar ground to the article by Paul Trevor and was thus been omitted - which accounts for the references starting at (4)) A later full version of this review is now available.)
Camerawork treated its themes from various perspectives, practical and theoretical, engaging its readers in a lively open debate. Photographs were central - its A3 format specifically designed for their effective use in single and double page spreads. Their strong blacks dominated the design of this 'sinister, black-covered magazine' (John Tagg, p64). By contrast this book gives a single view, designed around white space and elegant (if obscure) text, its sparse photographs insignificant pale interlopers. It marginalises photographs both literally and conceptually. What is important about Camerawork, it asserts, were these few theoretical academic essays - a betrayal of that unique and vital gestalt of theory and practice that was Camerawork. The title of this book is pure fiction. There were no 'Camerawork Essays'.
Out of context, are these essays are worth reading today?
John Berger writes well, but wrote this piece better as 'Uses of Photography' in his widely read 'About Looking'(4) filling in some 'missing links' in his thoughts and clarifying the relationship of his ideas to Sontag's On Photography (5).
John A Walker's 'Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning' (from issue 19 not 14) discusses at tedious length the effect of context on photographic meaning. He then looks at the role of shared pictorial stereotypes in creating common cultural understandings which limit the meanings we then ascribe to images.
John Tagg's attack on that sitting duck The Photography Year Book, 1977; is, as he says, 'out-dated stuff'. (p65) Despite his assertion that Kodak brought the camera to the masses in 1888; it was not until the 1950's and 60's that families like my own in the UK moved decisively behind the camera - an event that can be dated with precision by the demise of the beach photographer.
Victor Burgin's 'Art, Common Sense and Photography', a plain English translation of his article 'Photographic Theory and Art Practice'(6) represented a major triumph for the editorial team. It remains a useful brief introduction to the 'rhetoric of word and image' (p74).
Issue 26 of Camerawork: Models of Vision - Moments of Representation ran 'through several different models of what 'the image' has been taken to signify'. A discussion with Susan Meiselas on Nicaragua, articles on photographing war, and the Mafia, illustrated 'a model of the visible as knowledge, providing access to the urgent object of the photographer's concern.' Don Slater compared 'this vision as knowledge, ... with a quite different model of vision: vision as limitless and anchorless signification' to which Oliver Richon contributed images with text. A third section examined how computer, video and audio technologies might be changing the concept of representation. Here we get only Don Slater's lengthy situationist article with 'its crude periodisation, its association of photographic realism and the photograph-as-knowledge with nineteenth-century modernism; its association of spectacular representation with the twentieth century.'(p90) He is over-dogmatic and often spectacularly dismissive, for example 'August Sander more naively (than Weston or Blossfeldt) continued the classificatory quest of nineteenth-century science aimlessly and emptily.'(p111).
David Green's On Foucault: disciplinary power and photography concentrates on Foucault's 'formulation of the historical emergence of the body as the nexus of power/knowledge relations which give rise to what he (Foucault) termed a politics of the body '(p120). He successfully retains the impenetrability of the original.
Mass Observation: The Intellectual Climate by David Mellor, explores a curious thirties documentary project: public opinion polls, upper class spies and candid photography involving many leading London intellectuals (endorsed by Professor Bronislaw Malinowski.) Splendidly clear and informative, it cruelly lacks most of its original illustrations by Humphrey Spender. Mellor mentions admiring 'the totalising force of Don Macpherson's Foucauldian essay (Nation, Mandate, Memory - also reproduced in this volume) ... but it gave me a sense of over-mastering intellectual terrorism, a rhetoric of suspicion and a blind generality in attributing some myth of nostalgia and 'Britishness' to the process of reading those radically un-English and strange Spender photographs.'(p133)
Terry Smith demonstrates in Picturing History: The Matchgirls strike, 1888 that careful reading of photographs can give precise historical evidence and also 'that pictures - these ones for example - actually made history, had quite specific historical effects, influenced the actions of both the powerful and the powerless'.(p153)
Kathy Myers in Towards a Feminist Erotica outlines arguments from a women's discussion day and analyses the conventions used in two images of reclining women As she suggests, erotic imagery made for women may be appropriated for use by male viewers - which appears to her as a problem. (Perhaps pornography exists in the processes of production and consumption of images rather than in the images themselves - as ever in large part arbitrary signifiers.) In Loves Labour Lost she examines the 1983 UK General Election: - 'If Labour wants to be a viable party of the future it has to change its political vision of the media and how to use it'(p235), a lesson Tony Blair took to heart, although some feel that concentration on image is at the expense of substance. Her interview with Stuart Hall adds his name to the book cover.
Rosetta Brooks' Fashion: Double-Page Spread explores the photography of Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Debra Turbeville, and their use of stereotypes to promote an image rather than show the material. At that time, Brooks feels, the worlds of the fashion photographer and fine artist were appearing to converge, (for example in Cindy Sherman's 'film stills.'(7)). Since then she sees 'a movement back into the conservative worlds of fashion photography in the service of titillating illusion where the body is again the centre for male appropriation, and the elitist formulae of formalism in the art galleries.'(p206)
Significantly missing are both the essay written by Jo Spence (8) and Liz Wells's article on her, Woman Behind the lens(9). Spence's article is arguably vital in attempting to understand Camerawork and her part in it; Wells's piece puts honesty above hagiography. Both would have added to the stature of the book. The inclusion of the editor's own essay on Spence's later career is inappropriate; much more useful would have been research into the genesis of the magazine to have enabled a balanced treatment of Spence's contribution to it.
As stated before there were no 'Camerawork Essays' but a vital mix of varied texts and pictures of which this is a travesty. Its view of Camerawork is distorted through the spectacles of PCL, in omitting or minimising the contributions of those not party to that tendency. As a collection of writing on photography it has points of (largely historical) interest. Overall, as Paul Trevor aptly states in his contribution above, this 'is an exercise in that 90s phenomenon - repackaging.'
4. About Looking John Berger, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Ltd, London 1980, ISBN 0 906495 25 3, p48-63
5. On Photography, Susan Sontag, Penguin Books, London 1979 ISBN 0 14 005397 2
6. Studio International. vol.190 No.9766, 1975, reprinted in 'The End of Art Theory, Victor Burgin, Macmillan, 1986)
7. Untitled Film Stills, Cindy Sherman, Cape, London 1990 ISBN 0 224 03017 5
8. Cultural Sniping, Jo Spence and Jo Stanley (eds) Routledge, London, 1995 and Cultural Sniper, Jo Spence in Bodies of Excess, Ten-8 Vol II No 1 Spring 1991 5.
9. Camerawork, Issue 32, 1985 p26-28. Jo Spence 'The Politics of Photography' in issue 1
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