How does photography act as an important form of communication of both true and untrue subjects?

‘A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.’ (Sontag, 1977)

Ever since the dawn of photography, its usefulness, both in cultivating the mindset of the viewer toward the subject and in communicating a message visually, has been its allure. I will be analysing the work of pioneer photo essayist W. Eugene Smith, the widely commented-on war photographer Robert Capa, and important documentary photographer of the Depression era, Dorothea Lange. This is because their work all serves a function to tell a story. Whether or not it is a true story is the key to understanding the photographer’s individualism (and, arguably, integrity) as an artist.

Historically, the truthfulness of an image is always indefinite. Photography was first used by the rich to take family portraits. These were staged and composed entirely by the photographer. The subjects’ serious demeanours and plain body language is demonstrative in itself of just how far photography has evolved since those days of long exposures and big, inconvenient equipment. The equipment used to take pictures was yet another reason for the staging of photography; it was far easier to construct a composition than to allow the world to compose itself before a long exposure. There was an equivalent to ‘Photoshopping’ in the days before digital imagery – photographers would manipulate the darkroom development process to create images that were more appealing to their vision. Airbrushing, dodge and burn, and blurring were all tools used by the photographer to make small (and some less small) changes to their images. Therefore, the credibility of images throughout the history of photography is uncertain. Historian of Russia David King published a photobook in 1997 called The Commissar Vanishes, which discusses the erasure of enemies of the state in official photographs throughout the Stalinist era. It is described by King as ‘a terrifying – and often tragically funny – insight into one of the darkest chapters of modern history.’ (King, 1997)

It is a perfect demonstration of how the manipulation of photographs can alter how we view history and its events; and, hence, how important it is to maintain a discourse on the truthfulness of an image. The erasure of a subject means we have no way of telling exactly who was present at the time it was taken, which only contributes to the thick cloud of uncertainty around what exactly occurred during the terror era. Furthermore, a lack of transparency on what is staged and what is candid can also cause issues in determining history’s true events. The example I will discuss in this essay is Robert Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Soldier (1936), which is one of the most famously debated images of all time. In the case of more honest photographs – such as those taken in situ – they make accessible what is inaccessible; they allow those who, in a bygone age where travel is expensive and infrequent, cannot witness alternative lifestyles and cultures to their own to access this in a new medium. This is why the work of W. Eugene Smith was so important at the time; it was both educational and exciting for those who were unable to see it for themselves. Therefore, the importance of photography in relaying the events of history should not be understated – it is imperative that we as artists continue to use the medium to its advantages; to both document and inform.

The photo essays created by W. Eugene Smith between 1945 and his death in 1978 explore a variety of subjects, ranging from Minamata (1974), which explored the horrors of the mercury poisoning disaster in Minamata, Japan, to Nurse Midwife (1951), which told the story of an African American South Carolina nurse and midwife named Maude Callen. Smith’s work is constantly empathetic and he always worked tirelessly in his pursuit of the story – when photographing the invasion of Okinawa in 1945, he was critically wounded, and when he was photographing for his final essay in Japan, he was violently beaten by workers at the chemical factory who didn’t want his photographs to expose the suffering of the poison victims. This is illustrative of Smith’s devotion to his craft. This insatiable need to capture is a trait seen in many photographers, and it truly characterises his work. The structure of his photo essays has been replicated many times since they were published, by other artists who saw how successful the structure was in relaying the tale that Smith wanted to tell. This is perhaps why he has repeatedly been described as ‘perhaps one of the greatest photojournalists America has ever produced.’ (McGuire, 1999), and it is said that ‘the combination of innovation, integrity, and technical mastery in his photography made his work the standard by which photojournalism was measured for many years.’ (The International Center of Photography (ICP), n.d.) By using his photography as a way of communicating stories, Smith, and countless others like him, is an important example of how photography is, first and foremost, a medium through which to craft a narrative.

Robert Capa is widely renowned for his work photographing the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and chiefly for his most famous image, Death of a Loyalist Soldier (1936). This image was supposedly taken above a trench after Capa ‘just kind of put [his] camera above [his] head and even [sic] didn’t look and clicked the picture, when they moved over the trench’ (Capa, 1947) but came under suspicion in the 1970s, when other staged images were discovered to have been taken in the same place at the same time. In 2009, José Manuel Susperregui of the University of País Vasco published Sombras de la Fotografía (“Shadows of Photography”), which asserted, by analysing the mountain ranges in the background of the sequence, that the image was taken in Espejo, some 50 kilometres from the alleged location at Cerro Muriano. Whether or not this reflects positively or negatively on Capa as a photographer is up to the viewer; is it wrong to deceive the world if the pictures still serve the intended purpose, or is it dishonest to incorrectly document history?

Another artist whose work could be construed as dishonest is Dorothea Lange, most famous for her documentary photography during the Depression era in America. Travelling through California whilst working for a government agency responsible for providing aid to struggling farmers, Lange took her most famed image, Migrant Mother, in 1936. This image is renowned for its captivating, evocative tone, and it is still viewed worldwide as an important insight into civilian life in Depression era America. However, I am more concerned with two images taken by Lange three years later, in 1939. The first, shown below, was taken after the photographer introduced herself and asked to take their picture. The subjects smile and the father wipes the baby’s face.

The photo that became more famous, after it was used by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to demonstrate the effects of the Depression, was this one.

It is clearly the un-staged version; where the photographer has captured the subjects’ natural states. The general caption for this series of images reads ‘The car is parked outside the Employment Office.  The family have arrived, before opening of the potato season.  They have been on the road for one month–have sick baby…Father washed the baby’s face with edge of blanket dampened from canteen, for the photographs’ (Mason, 2010). This shows that Lange does not intentionally represent the effects of the Depression in this way; it is instead the FSA that widely publicise this particular version of the photograph. This is because the organisation has an agenda to bring awareness to the issues caused by the government mismanagement and hyperinflation of the time, especially in rural California, where the issue of the Dustbowl caused an extreme lack of fertile ground and, hence, a widespread hunger. This therefore has a very palpable effect on how we view the period; we are not able to imagine what life could have been like unless we personally experienced it, and, therefore, photographs are the tool we use to unlock the intricate details (fairly modern) history. This therefore demonstrates once again how important it is to understand and also challenge the source of an image – who took it and why? What could their intentions have been? Were they commissioned to take it? If we neglect to, we could fall into the trap of passing history down incorrectly.

Overall, it is clear that the importance of photography lies very firmly in its power as a window into the past, and into the presently inaccessible. One reason that humans are inherently captivated by the medium is the way in which it allows us to freeze time forever in a single exposure that appears exactly how it appeared to us in the moment. There are of course, as I have explored in this essay, many ways in which a photographer can manipulate the scene, so it is different to how it appeared in the moment, and this is a further reason as to why we feel such attraction to photography; it allows us to become puppeteers, narrators, and storytellers. I think that this holds importance as it reveals that the human race are programmed to tell stories, whether these be true or untrue, and that they enjoy the consumption of such stories. The existence of photographic archives all over the globe demonstrates further that history is only as rich as we make it; we are the creators of ‘history’, and so we are responsible for the maintenance of its truths.

Bibliography

Capa, R., 1947. Bob Capa Tells of Photographic Experiences Abroad [Interview] (20 October 1947).

King, D., 1997. The Commissar Vanishes. 1st ed. London: Tate Publishing.

Mason, J. E., 2010. How Photography Lies, Even When It’s Telling the Truth: FSA Photography & the Great Depression. [Online]
Available at: https://johnedwinmason.typepad.com/john_edwin_mason_photogra/2010/03/how_photography_lies.html
[Accessed 22 January 2024].

McGuire, R., 1999. Unforgettable book combines art, artifact ‘W. Eugene Smith, Photographs, 1934-1975’. [Online]
Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/books/reviews/9901/04/eugene.smith/
[Accessed 19 January 2024].

Sontag, S., 1977. On Photography. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The International Center of Photography (ICP), n.d. Artist: W. Eugene Smith. [Online]
Available at: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/w-eugene-smith?all/all/all/all/0
[Accessed 19 January 2024].