Photography in the mid-20th century: The Picture Universe

Tom Maloney, ed. The Picture Universe (1961) 25th Anniversary collection pf photos from US Camera. At one time, there were many photo magazines, most of them like US Camera thinly disguised monthly catalogues of photographic equipment. The photo captions always specified the camera, the f-stop, and the exposure, and usually also the film, and sometimes lenses and filters. The implication was clear: Buy the technology, and you, too, can be a world-class photographer.
     Well, if this collection is reliable evidence, world-class photographers were few and far between. Most of the photos in this book are safe compositions of safe subjects, including cats. A handful are images we’ve seen in many anthologies, such as David Duncan’s “1,000 yard stare” portrait of a US soldier in Vietnam. The text consists mostly of mini-bios of the more prominent photographers, most of them employed by newspapers and magazines. The notion that photography, even news photography, could be more than a technically excellent record of some momentary event, is beginning to influence picture-taking. There are hints of how photography would change in the 60s and 70s, when photographers began to exploit and extend the aesthetic vocabulary implicit in the medium.
     As a record of US photography, this is unwittingly a pretty good book. It shows us the many then-current competent photographers and images that have been all but forgotten. Then as now, working photographers made pictures that served their purposes, sometimes very well. The limitations of half-tone and letterpress on glossy paper don’t hide the technical excellence of the images. These people knew how to get the pictures they wanted.

    Then as now, a handful of photographers were moving photography beyond the workaday expectations. The few images made by Adams, Steichen, Lange etc seem to jump off the page, in part because they have been seen so often, but mainly because they are so different from the surrounding well-made competent craft.
     Nowadays, photography has become just another medium for image-making. Digital cameras are everywhere, and their built-in algorithms make technical perfection common-place. The emphasis, even for amateur photography, has become the memorable story, the astonishing event, the gob-smacking image, the exotic subject. Images and videos go viral when they confirm the viewers’ suspicion that the world out there pullulates with the weird and appalling, and only the misfortune of being stuck in a dreary backwater prevents one from living a vastly more exciting and terrifying life.
     Has this inundation of pictures done much good? I doubt it. We have lost the ability, or rather the patience, to look. In 1961, good photographers still aimed at making people look again. I think they achieved that objective. That so much of their work now seems merely competent should remind us that they had not yet discovered the full range of the medium. Nor have we.
     There were many other compendiums of contemporary photography. This is an interesting book, but not a keeper. **½