Seven books on photography

Indeed, Cartier-Bresson writes about his photojournalistic experiences in China, Moscow, and Cuba. He also speaks lovingly of Robert Capa, Robert Doisneau, and other great photographers. He disdains the staged picture, saying that photography is a “quick business — an instant, a gush, a response.” Likewise, speed preoccupied me after reading the epic history book, “Photography: The Whole Story” (Prestel, 2012), edited by Juliet Hacking. The microscope gave humankind the unimagined smaller world, the camera the faster one; we didn’t know that all four hooves went airborne when a horse galloped, for instance, until Eadweard Muybridge’s 1882 freeze frames proved it so.

But I was also interested in lack of speed: The book features “Boulevard du Temple, Paris,” from the man who gave us the daguerreotype, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. It’s one of the first panoramas ever taken, from way back in 1838, yet the daylit streets are virtually empty of people. That’s because “the long exposure time and their haste to get somewhere condemned them to the status of ghosts.” The only people visible are the man at the bootblack’s stand, a few others at a table — because they’d been motionless for enough minutes.

I was struck, next, by newborn photography’s uneasy relationship to painting. The camera comes from the camera obscura, which projected an image for tracing, until it became clear that a lens worked better than a pinhole. In the mid-1800s, Charles Baudelaire, the poet, declared that art’s “most mortal enemy” was commercial photography. By the early 20th century, though, photography acquired an “aesthetic of its own,” according to Alfred Stieglitz. By the Depression, documentary photography is deemed powerful enough to merit government funding, as the Farm Security Administration sends out 20 photographers, including Walker Evans, Lange, and Russell Lee. And now we recall those times through their archetypal images, like Lange’s famous “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936.’’

A book with a subtitle like “the whole story” can overwhelm, so I was refreshed by the friendlier “The Ongoing Moment” (Vintage, 2007). Author Geoff Dyer is a novelist, and he’s mindful of his great philosophical precursors; “One of the challenges of writing this book was to avoid quoting Berger, Sontag, Barthes and Walter Benjamin every five pages.” You know how the Salvation Army helpfully sorts its clothes by color? Dyer has his own merciful taxonomy. He shows how different photographers have been drawn to shoot images of blind people, for instance (partly because they don’t know you’re there), which ambles to his thoughts on pictures of blind accordionists, and on to Ed Clark’s famous 1945 photo “Going Home,” which shows an African-American accordionist weeping as Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral train passes by. Other illuminating categories: photos of hands (like Stieglitz’s shots of Georgia O’Keeffe’s) and drive-in movie screens at night (from Michael Ormerod, Lee Friedlander, and Paul Fusco).

Confession time: I’ve always cravenly avoided Susan Sontag’s work, thinking it would be too hard, too academic, leaded with terms like “heuristic” and “ontological.” I was so wrong; Sontag’s 1977 masterpiece, “On Photography” (Picador, 2001), offers a lifetime of wisdom, cut into crystalline sentences. She began the enterprise as a way to consider the “omnipresence” of photographic images in the modern world (one wishes she were alive to dissect selfies). And she detonates insight after insight. “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera,” she writes. They manhandle time; they colonize experience; and they push us toward voyeurism, rather than participation. But there is also the democratization of the medium; we don’t all paint or sculpt, but we can all snap pictures. Then this: Photography provides the “image-world that bids to outlast us all.” Finally this, which I read with a chill: “all photographs are memento mori.”

The French intellectual Roland Barthes ponders this inherent morbidity in photography. And even though “heuristic” and “ontological” appear within the first pages, the prose is clean-swept, and the ideas both brilliant and poignant in “Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography” (Hill and Wang, 2010, first out in 1980). I was most moved by the section where Barthes sifts through a lifetime of photos of his late, beloved mother. Most evoke “only her identity, not her truth,” but one childhood photo transcends: “In this little girl’s image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever.” The book is also famous for Barthes’s redeployment of the Latin word “punctum” to describe a “puncturing” element in a photograph “which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” I lingered over the photos, all punctum-filled for the author, from James Van Der Zee, Lewis Hine, and Richard Avedon.

I’d been steeped in geometry, speed, mortality. Now I was caught by the photographic view’s “absolute novelty in world history,” in Barthes’s words. Punctum that: The privilege of seeing an ancestor’s images is incredibly recent. But John Berger, the painter and art critic, reworked my angles again, kicking down such grandiosity. His “Understanding a Photograph” (Aperture, 2013) grappled with the idea of value. A painting is rare and thus a piece of property. A photo (which can be infinitely reproduced) is not rare and not property. Therefore, says Berger, photographs are “no closer to works of art than cardiograms.”

Still, their power persists, and the book includes about two dozen of his essays written over 40 years, a bunch done in response to Sontag’s “On Photography.” He wrestles with the shock (and diminishing shock) of war photos, and the implications of a photo of Che Guevara’s propped-up corpse. There is also a beautiful piece about August Sanders’ 1914 “Peasants going to a dance, Westerwald, 1914” and conversations with Sebastiao Salgado and Cartier-Bresson, at the age of 86.

I began with a book by a photographer, and I’ll end with another: “Why People Photograph” (Aperture, 1994) is a deceptively plainsong modern classic by Robert Adams, who specializes in pictures of the American West — and knows this is well-mined territory. Take Ansel Adams, “who, after a period of extraordinary creativity, lapses into formula.” Like Dyer, Adams imposes taxonomy, tracing styles through pictures of dogs from various photographers. And he offers admiring essays on many in the pantheon, including Edward Weston, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Gilpin. Perhaps because of where I live, I most loved Adams’s take on Paul Strand’s “Time in New England” photo series, where no matter how flinty the landscape and people, they glow “almost in the manner of El Greco.” He was summing up Strand here, but this holds true for all great photographers, and the moments they arrest: “He seems to have observed a charge,” wrote Adams, “running through the world.”

Katharine Whittemore is a freelance writer based in Northampton. She can be reached at katharine.whittemore@ comcast.net.