In 1950, Irving Penn, working for Vogue in Paris, set himself up in a glass-roofed attic and, between fashion assignments, began a series of full-length portraits of tradesmen, inspired by the street portraits of Eugène Atget 50 years before. Later that year he continued the project in a painter’s studio in Chelsea.
Penn found that the working people of London responded to his invitation to be photographed differently from those in Paris. ‘In general, the Parisians doubted that we were doing exactly what we said we were doing. They felt there was something fishy going on, but they came to the studio more or less as directed — for the fee involved,’ he remembered. ‘But the Londoners were quite different from the French. It seemed to them the most logical thing in the world to be recorded in their work clothes.’
Penn took the photographs by natural light against the undifferentiated background of an old theatre curtain. He expanded his series in New York in 1951. The pictures were intended for magazine reproduction, but from the 1960s onwards he experimented with making them into platinum prints. Before his death last month, Virginia Heckert and Anne Lacoste edited a collection of 250 tritone plates from his series, under the title Small Trades (Getty Publications, £34.99).
These are portraits of unknown men and women, their humanity expressed through the props of their trade and through the expressions, wry, challenging or correct, that they present to the camera. A London lorry-washer in beret and waders holds his long-poled brush aloft like Don Quixote’s lance. A scarcely credible Paris contortionist, his head tucked so far through his legs that he looks up to the sky, retains his hat undisturbed on his head. These images, in their calm, clear concentration, present monochrome photography at its purest. The light falls on the creases of the ironed surface of a nurse’s apron as if it were the tablecloth in a Flemish painting of the Last Supper.
When Penn was in Paris, back in New York, Homer Page was finishing a year’s Guggenheim fellowship, photographing the people on the city’s streets: their feet, their hats, their loiterings and sleep, their poverty and furs, their joshing teenagers and their sad children. It was meant to be a book, but it didn’t work out, partly through Page’s perfectionism. Now the photographs from that year are presented by Keith F. Davis in The Photographs of Homer Page (Yale, £38).
This is great photography. Each (black and white) picture reveals something about real people that incites a curiosity in the viewer that is never to be satisfied. They are like conversation pieces in Victorian painting. What is that woman in the headscarf thinking about, staring into nowhere in a crowded subway train? Why is the man in shirtsleeves asleep on a hard cobbled roadway between two trucks? Among the people, hopeless signs — ‘Better Dresses for $8.75’ or ‘Navy Surplus Sun Glasses, 50c’ — provide a commentary of their own on the hot grimy streets.
The period six decades ago seems of peculiar interest to us now, for its clothes, surroundings and mores. It was then that Jane Bown was beginning her career at the Observer. Brought up largely by aunts, called Primrose, Daisy, Violet, Iris and Ivy, she has displayed, despite this early vegetable love, or perhaps because of it, an unflagging interest in what the face reveals.
A selected 100 or so of her portraits fill the album Exposures (Guardian Books, £30), accompanied by minimal commentary. Like Penn’s, the images are black and white, taken by available light. Jane Bown’s habitual method of judging exposure is to look at the back of her hand, like an experienced cook testing the heat of an oven. The thin depth of field in her photographs puts the focus on the eyes: Francis Bacon’s in 1985, as he leans from his door to say goodbye, ‘that haunted face against a simple, dark background’; Lucian Freud’s in 1983, staring ‘with a defiant expression’, the screen against which he stood obscuring the chaos of his studio behind; Anthony Blunt’s, or one of them, the other left in the shadows, in 1968, the year he published Sicilian Baroque and a decade before his own exposure as a spy.
They are mostly faces we know, but a poignant little image, taken with a Rolleiflex, capturing every detail and texture, during a session photographing Evelyn Waugh and his family, depicts his son Auberon, aged 11, wearing his school blazer, tousle-haired and determined, standing in front of a tree in silhouette. ‘Some people take pictures,’ the photographer says, ‘I find them.’
As Luke Dodd notes in his introduction, Jane Bown has had ‘little truck with the kind of darkroom manipulation that is the hallmark of many photographers’ work’. The antithesis of Jane Bown is the third Landscape Photographer of the Year collection (AA Publishing, £25), presenting photographs from the competition that hung on show in the National Theatre. Colour is the making of most of them, and the cliché of the year is the sea presented as a kind of soup, through the use of a neutral density filter and a long exposure.
The landscapes caught are often breathtaking, whatever chopping and changing has been applied to the image in Adobe Photoshop. More exploratory are several shots under the landscape — through the oval arches beneath the Balcombe railway viaduct in Sussex or beneath the pier at Brighton, with red and green scraps of netting caught on its cross-bracings.
At least people are still getting up at dawn — many of them, the captions to the Landscape Photograph competition reveal, on Christmas Day — to catch the world through a lens. Yet, as an art, photography sprang fully armed from its cradle. Has it improved? Nothing better demonstrates its innate ability to suggest the texture of surfaces than the first plate from The Pencil of Nature, published by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1844. It shows a corner of the Queen’s College, Oxford, ‘on its surface the most evident marks of the injury of time and weather in the abraded state of the stone’. It is very beautiful. That picture figures among the 55 plates chosen by Geoffrey Batchen for William Henry Fox Talbot (£14.95) in Phaidon’s ‘55’ monograph series.
Not that darkroom and post-darkroom manipulation were foreign to Victorian habits. In the 1860s Frances, Viscountess Jocelyn, a stepdaughter of Palmerston’s and a Lady of the Bedchamber to the Queen, developed her own photographs by the wet collodion technique and then cut out the figures of her sitters, mounting them in groups on pen and coloured wash drawing-room backgrounds in an album. She and her friends thought this was nice.
The phantasmagorical imagination of the 19th-century soon took things further — much further, as Elizabeth Siegel shows in Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage (Yale, £35). The heads of ladies in 1870s bonnets sit on the necks of prim ducks in a pond. Busts of bearded gentlemen occupy the spots on a butterfly’s wings. An infant in frocks rides on a swallow’s back. These are the product of leisure, humour and strange fancies.
Finding the surreal in daily reality, and accentuating it in colour (at least since 1984), the work of Martin Parr (£14.95) has been selected by Sandra S. Phillips for the same Phaidon monograph series as Fox Talbot’s. A giant portrait of George V looks down on buffet customers at King’s Cross station. Two stools reserve a parking space next to a puddle outside a café in Mexico City advertising economical breakfasts. A deliquescing Danish pastry in close-up disgusts. But there’s also a fine strong cup of tea in a blue willow- pattern cup and saucer on a bright red gingham cloth, saved in 1997 from ephemeral oblivion.
An A to Z history of photography comes neatly packaged in The Photography Book (Phaidon, £6.95). But this mini-format edition (4⅞×6⅜ inches) is too small to see the photographs to much advantage or even to read the captions of the 500 photographs, from Gustave Le Gray to the fashion photographer Nick Knight. The 8¼×9⅝ format, still in print, is worth the extra £8, even if, with one image per photographer, it is a fairly hit and miss guide. I can’t find that it has been updated since 1997.
More up to date, but less satisfactory is Photo Box: Bringing the Great Photographers into Focus (Thames & Hudson, £19.95). A fatal flaw in its format is to present many of the 250 photographs sideways, so that the book has to be turned round while reading the commentary on the facing page. The bias is towards the past two decades, though there are classic images from the previous century or so — Nadar’s studio portrait of a young Sarah Bernhardt, bare-shouldered and wrapped in a tasselled cloak or curtain, from 1860 (it says, or perhaps a little later) or August Sander’s bricklayer from 1928 (from a series that influenced Penn). The arrangement is by themes and there is no index, so you cannot find anything. The book was first published in Italy and there are more photographs by Italians than the rest of the world might expect.
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