now at lumiere.net.nz
A Short History of Photography
Harvey Benge photographs;Introduction by Gerry Badger
Godwit/RH, NZ$44.95 | Reviewed by Andy Palmer
THE IDEA is an interesting one. Unfortunately the result is less so. A Short History Of Photography aims to be a... short history of photography – specifically a short history of contemporary art photography from the 1960s on. Looking at the names on the cover, it’s a reasonable list of the more influential photographers of the last few decades (plus a couple of names I didn’t know). Where this book falls down is in the application of the its conceit.
This ‘history’ lesson is an anthology of Harvey Benge’s photographs. According to the introductory text by respected UK photography writer Gerry Badger, “the pictures here did not arise from a conscious stylistic exercise, where Harvey Benge set out deliberately to make a ‘Shore’ or a ‘Koudelka’,” but from Benge’s regular practice. This strikes me as both the main problem with the book and not entirely true.
Badger’s text speaks about style, that thing which makes a photographer (artist, writer, designer etc.) unique. Style in photography involves subject matter, composition, framing, technical choices (camera, film, etc.), and numerous other tangible items which mark the image as being made by a certain photographer.
Strangely for such an experienced writer, the introduction is a bit puzzling and contradictory. Both Badger and Benge seem to confuse style and subject matter. At the same time Badger suggests style is inherently personal. While there is a relationship, a photographic/artistic style will to some degree translate to any subject. The fact that an artist may favour, for example, landscapes, does not make the landscape their style.
Badger also has a go at “those big vacuous pieces of photographic fluff that grace... so many contemporary art galleries.” Yet this is the category into which I place much of Benge’s exhibition work – ordinary images printed large to give them impact.
While ‘Style’ can be broken down into various components, it’s hard to copy – look at all the wannabe Ansel Adams who fail to make images as majestic as the originals. One of the first assignments I did when studying photography was to shoot in the style of a chosen photographer. I chose William Eggleston, who is coincidentally an influence on Benge’s work and ‘appears’ in this book. I got a B- (from memory) because while the subject matter was adequately Eggleston, my technique let me down. I was bummed. Until I worked out that my tutor was entirely correct in his comments.
It’s this which lets A Short History down. To shoot in the ‘style of’, it’s not enough to shoot similar subject matter, to crop to a certain film format, or to convert images to black and white. You need a deeper appreciation of what the photographer was doing, how they were doing it, and why. Benge’s photos end up being more a reminder of (some quite lazy and obvious), than in the style of.
Unlike Badger, I don’t feel that the images are “all genuine original Benges”. As someone who has followed Benge’s career over the past decade, he seemed to have found a particular voice – I’ve heard him, arguably unfairly, described as a sub-par Martin Parr. It seems to me that some of the images were taken specifically with this project in mind – or at least as very strong and conscious references to specific photographers. The Araki and Crewdson being the most obvious examples. Admittedly this disparity could be because I only ever see what Benge publishes, not everything he shoots.
For me the biggest problem with this book is that the images are neither ‘in the style of’ nor are they entirely ‘original Benges’, they’re struggling in some mediocre middle ground. For example, the (I guess, Robert) Adams is a boring rural Auckland landscape lacking Adams’ pointed political commentary, and the Crewdson is completely deficient in the cinematic drama of the original, not to mention the technical skill and perfectionist detailing.
A couple of the images (Meyerowitz and Frank) were in Benge’s previous book You Are Here. The Meyerowitz is printed with less green this time and loses a lot of its original punch. While the Frank’s conversion to black and white lessens its pull. This isn’t to say that some of the images don’t grab me – I actually quite like the Crewdson and Dijkstra as images.
If Benge had approached this as more of a project and either spent time to make images more strongly in the style of, or better still, made originals which more strongly referenced these photographers without trying to copy or imitate, I think the book would have been all the better for it. Benge is not a technical photographer, and I think for a project of this scope to fully succeed requires someone with greater technical knowledge and ability, not a collector of snapshots.
Another problem with A Short History is that it isn’t a strong cohesive Benge book. I put this down to the constraints of the conceit, which forces Benge to present the work too formally and conservatively. All this does is help focus our attention on weaker images which would normally be less obvious in his books.
I’m at a loss as to who this book is aimed at. I showed it to a couple of friends with an interest in photography, but who don’t have a huge knowledge of its history and influential practitioners. They felt some of the images were quite nice, but they failed to pick up on the book’s conceit – the artists and works referenced were under their radar. Yet anybody with a good knowledge of the artists and works will, no doubt, pick holes in these images as I am. It’s all a bit in-jokey, and if you get the joke, you also know where it fails. If you don’t get the joke the book probably has no particular appeal. And that seems to defeat the purpose somewhat.
Badger states, “For photographers, [style] should be something one should think about, yet ignore at one and the same time. Ultimately, the ‘style for the job’ will probably remain the best approach, because that derives from subject, and subject is everything in photography.”
The first part of that statement is true enough. It’s what good photographers do; it’s what helps define them and their work. The last sentence is just wrong. It seems like Badger is justifying this book’s publication, but if that statement were true then surely we would not be able to differentiate, to use my earlier example, an Ansel Adams from his thousands of copyists, or the photos in A Short History from the artists Benge references.
As much as I’d like to be able to recommend this book, I can’t. If you want a once-over-lightly short and breezy history of photography, there are any number of other publications out there which will give you a better insight to these and other influential photographers.
