This is Meudon, a quiet Paris suburb,
apart from the rumble of the occasional high-speed train.
In 1928, at roughly the midpoint between the invention of photography and our digital age,
André Kertész, one of the great photographers of the 20th century,
came here and took some pictures.
The photographs he took that day are as unremarkable as Meudon itself.
But something about the place must have caught his eye,
because a few days later, he came back...
and turned the ordinary into something extraordinary.
Photography always transforms what it describes.
That's the art of photography, to control that transformation.
Kertész's Meudon encapsulates something of the elusive genius of photography.
Perhaps he had a precedent in mind when he made it.
But this etching of the same scene, made a decade before,
doesn't tease us the way its photographic equivalent does.
With the photograph, we can't help but wonder who the figure in the foreground is,
where he has been, what he is carrying and where he is taking it.
How can something that reveals so much keep so much to itself?
Photography is about the frame you put around the image,
what comes in or what is cut off.
And yet the story doesn't end.
It's told beyond the frame through a kind of intuition.
In the course of our 170-year relationship,
photography has delighted us, served us, moved us, outraged us,
and occasionally disappointed us.
But mainly it has intrigued us,
by showing the secret strangeness that lies beneath the world of appearances.
And that is photography's true genius.
Photography, they say, was invented in 1839.
That was the year that a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre,
and an Englishman, Henry Fox Talbot,
announced rival processes that would, in a popular phrase of the day, "fix the shadows."
But the idea of photography has been around for much longer than that,
as Abe Morell and his family and friends are about to demonstrate.
It looks like the light is getting better in the afternoon.
It's getting, actually, more... from the front, which is... That's a good sign.
Light is my, er, my wisdom and my enemy. It's really kind of amazing.
I mean, photography's so perverse, you know.
You need darkness to see light,
pictures are negative, things are upside down when you see through a camera.
There's a kind of a weird conversion in photography.
I think it's part of the charm of it,
like black magic or something.
Almost ready.
Oh, my God! Oh, it's wonderful!
That's wonderful.
The camera obscura is an optical phenomenon
that's simple to create and hard to believe.
A blacked out room and a small hole that allows a tight beam of light to enter.
And with it, the outside world comes pouring in,
upside down and twice as natural.
I've been teaching photography for 20 years now.
And one of the nicest ways of introducing the classroom to the idea of the camera
was to actually put them in one, put them inside one.
So I would turn the classrooms into a camera obscura.
And it's guaranteed, every time,
very savvy, hip visual people are ecstatic, they're dumbfounded.
And it just... It proves to me that there is something very deep and primitive about it.
It's not something that one has invented.
It's not like Sony has developed this new chip to make this happen, you know.
This is totally natural.
The desire for photography is an ancient one.
The Roman writer Pliny recounts the legend
of a young woman who traced the outline of her departing lover's shadow on the wall.
Inspired by this, her father made the first sculpture,
and so Western art was born.
But all the poor girl really wanted was a snapshot.
It wasn't until the 1830s that science found a way to satisfy a desire
that by then had become part of the zeitgeist.
It's no accident that the early conceptions of photography
happened to coincide with the era that we call now Romanticism,
because many of the ideas and concerns of the Romantic movement
find themselves embodied in the experiments towards photography.
Let's say, Coleridge would be lying on a hillside and looking up.
In his half-dazed eyes he sees dazzling sun and he thinks,
"How can I possibly capture this evanescent moment?"
And photography, this thing which captures a moment from time,
and fixes it in place, is a kind of answer to this Romantic struggle.
It had been known for centuries what a camera obscura could do.
The breakthrough came with the observation that certain chemicals were light sensitive.
(Batchen) This was well known for at least a century before 1839,
that, for example, silver salts, silver chloride, silver nitrate,
reacted and responded to light, darkened,
and that therefore images could be made.
The problem that was difficult to solve was to stop the image being made,
to find a way of fixing the image, stopping it developing and eventually becoming black.
We have, for example, an account published in 1802
by Humphry Davy in the journals of the Royal Institution,
where he discusses experiments that he and Tom Wedgwood had been making,
experimenting with these silver salts.
They soaked a piece of leather and then they tried to make contact prints,
where they literally put a piece, say a botanical specimen, directly onto it,
exposed it to light, and then for a moment they actually saw an image come up.
And then heartbreakingly, I suppose, the image kept going black until it disappeared.
So as early as 1802,
well before the announcement of a marketable photographic process in 1839,
we find at least these two people, and probably many more,
who have experienced photography momentarily.
Among the proto-photographers struggling to fix the fleeting shadows
was Henry Fox Talbot, MP, the Master of Lacock Abbey
and a world authority on botany and cuneiform writing.
But there was one flaw in this polymath's list of accomplishments.
He couldn't draw for toffee.
(Schaff) Here's Henry Talbot, who is accomplished in all sorts of things,
but he has absolutely no idea
how to take that complicated, colourful three-dimensional world
and get it down to lines on a piece of paper.
And it was then that he started thinking about the camera obscura
and started thinking about about chemistry.
And when he went back to Lacock, some time in the spring of 1834,
his fertile mind started putting all these things together.
Talbot experimented, using paper coated with silver salts
and shoebox-sized cameras that were nicknamed "mousetraps".
Soon they began catching things never seen before,
the strange mirror images from the ghost world of the photographic negative.
This sort of achievement would have been exactly what Talbot was trying to get.
It's a negative.
The tones are reversed and it's laterally reversed, left to right.
Which allowed a print, when it was sandwiched with another sheet of photographic paper,
to print up in the correct way round.
But the negative itself is something that Talbot appreciated,
and people in his day did, as well,
and today we kind of lose sight of that.
But if you look at one of these things from an abstract standpoint, it's a beautiful object.
Talbot's paper negatives were more than beautiful.
They represented the breakthrough on which modern photography would be founded.
I think Talbot's most important inventions
were not so much chemical as they were conceptual.
He understood immediately that he could make prints from these.
So, one of his first thoughts
is that this is going to be a way to make it possible
to reproduce images for the masses,
and to produce books that never would have gotten done otherwise.
But while Talbot quietly continued his experiments,
he discovered that he had a rival.
In January 1839, Louis Daguerre thrilled the prestigious Académie française in Paris
with news of his own method for fixing the shadows.
Louis Daguerre was an academically trained French painter,
somebody who we think began experimenting with photography in about 1824.
That's about the same time that he was also producing his diorama paintings,
very large-scale paintings that he put into a darkened room
and he sold seats to people, much like an early cinematic experience.
His background was as an entrepreneur, as a showman,
as someone who was interested in spectacle and display and presentation.
And indeed that was acted out
when he presented his discovery to the world.
Daguerre's discovery was very different from the methods Talbot had been exploring.
Instead of a paper-based process,
Daguerre fixed his images on a mirrored metal plate.
And unlike Talbot's negative-positive process,
Daguerre's produced one-off images, like a Polaroid.
Even so, according to the contemporary champions of the daguerreotype,
like photographer Jerry Spagnoli,
it produces a visual experience that's unique.
I remember my first experience with the daguerreotype.
I was just... I was stunned.
I was immediately stunned. It was like a miracle.
It just looked like a prodigy of nature.
In the 19th century, it was referred to as the mirror with a memory,
and that's a beautiful description of precisely what a dageurreotype is.
(Rexer) A dageurreotype is not a conventional operating system the way a photograph is.
That is, the light operates differently with a dageurreotype.
The silver grains of the image sit up on the surface,
in a way that they don't quite in a photograph.
In a paper photograph, they tend to sink into the surface.
What you see when you look at a dageurreotype is light reflected back through an image,
and there's something about that that begins to approximate
the actual experience of the taking of the photograph itself,
that particular moment when the image is captured.
The people that you're looking at seem, not exactly alive, but on the edge of being present.
One of the things that's interesting about this process,
and which makes it different from other photographic processes,
there's no separation between the material that you shoot with and the finished result.
The plate that was in the camera is the same plate which would eventually be displayed.
For me there's an immediacy in that relationship
between the image and the actual physical artefact of the event.
(Close) I always loved dageurreotypes.
Everything I love about photography was already there in the 1840s and '50s.
An incredible value range,
from absolute, reflected bright white
to the deepest, darkest, velvetiest blacks.
Unbelievable amount of detail, usually a great deal of difference in depth of field,
because the lens has to be so wide open.
And they're intimate.
Now I have to put it up onto a gilding stand and turn on a torch and get into that.
If you don't gild it, you could wipe the image off with the slightest touch.
Even a brushstroke across the surface of the dageurreotype will remove the image.
(Schaff) I love dageurreotypes, and they're marvellous and they're pretty,
but it's a dead end.
Talbot recognised that human communication was through paper.
The big weakness of the dageurreotype
was that you could not make multiple reproductions from the original image,
and that's where ultimately Talbot's system came to dominate the dageurreotype.
(Schaff) The cruel irony is that Daguerre is this public showman trying to reach a huge market,
and what he invents is the most intimate of all photographic processes.
It's something that only one person can see,
and Henry Talbot, who was a tremendously private person,
trying to meet a private need,
invents the system that propagates photography throughout the world.
So he unwittingly became the showman that Daguerre wanted to be.
The beginnings of photography were all about that.
They were all about a kind of Darwinian struggle to see which process would triumph.
But the determinants of that struggle were fairly clear.
How quickly, how cheaply, how accurately could an image be made?
How widely could it be distributed?
And you simply cannot write an aesthetic history of photography,
or even a merely technological history of photography,
without talking about money, because you have to talk about money and industry
in order to get a sense of why the landscape of photography
looks the way it does now.
Talbot's process may have had market forces on its side,
but its ultimate triumph was a long time coming.
In its first decades, all photography, whether on paper, metal, glass or tin,
was a matter of wonder
and even disbelief.
When the first dageurreotypes were shown in London,
there was a reviewer who wrote in The Times
about their "Lilliputian draughtsmanship".
So they have that wonder, that sort of sense of impossibility.
How could somebody do that?
How could you possibly draw a whole cityscape in ten minutes?
It was both this incredibly fine, gossamer draughtsmanship,
and this incredible speed at the same time.
Behind the magic effortlessness of the camera lay a deeper mystery,
and one that remains the source of the medium's greatest power to this day.
The photographed world, it turned out, was a strange place,
a looking-glass world,
resembling our own in everything except in the way things appeared.
Everybody assumed that they knew what these pictures were going to look like,
and it took a while for people to realise
that, in fact, the photographic medium creates a lot of surprises.
It doesn't describe the world just they way you expected it to.
The camera does that. Anything you've taken a picture of, you've put a frame around it,
and you've narrowed the viewer's eyesight
and said, "Look at this. This is special."
And sometimes it's almost a random point of view,
but because it's cropped off it's no longer random.
It's considered intentional.
So that becomes, "Look at this. This is special."
But the photographic medium itself doesn't care what's important and what's not.
So, if you point it at something you think is important,
it's going to register all the unimportant stuff around it
with just the same precision and fullness.
All-seeing but undiscriminating,
the camera revealed a world teeming in detail.
This is a study of Trafalgar Square by Talbot.
It's filled with smog, and so you really have the atmospheric feeling of being right there,
in a smog-filled city.
You see the bills that are pasted to those hoardings,
which you can actually read.
(Schaff) Including the sign that says, "Post no bills."
(Haworth-Booth) Henry James has this great phrase, "The thick detail of London life."
That's what it is, and photography is uniquely suited to capture this, of course,
because it's a machine.
It doesn't have a hierarchy of psychological interest.
It just swallows everything up instantly.
But this is also fascinating.
If you think about Nelson's column under construction,
which is the formal title of this, and you look at it, the column's hardly in the picture.
I think what Talbot was looking at here more
was, this was a period of enormous disruption, this is 1844.
This is a period of enormous disruption throughout Europe,
and all of the governments are being threatened,
the whole social order is being threatened.
Talbot, I think, was really trying to document a modern London
and a modern social structure
that he knew was on the verge of change.
This photograph is really much more about that sense of change in the world.
The world was changing.
It was becoming recognisably modern,
thanks to the new technologies of the mid-19th century.
Before the railway, people had moved no faster than the fastest horse.
Before the telegraph, the speediest form of communication was the carrier pigeon.
Before photography, time had moved forward inexorably, like a river.
By speeding up travel, making communications instantaneous and freezing time,
these new technologies not only changed the world,
they changed the way people understood the world.
We start to enter not just the industrial era of machines,
but the industrial era of perception and information and travel.
The railroad, the telegraph, photography, and technologies that are speeding up the world
and moving us from a world of solid objects to this world of information and images,
speeding by, faster and faster.
There's a remarkable phrase that comes from an Alexander Pope poem,
"the annihilation of time and space"
that gets used over and over and over again in that period.
It feels like this breaking apart of the organic flow of time
into something much more manipulable,
whether it's by speeding it up through railroads or freezing it through photographs.
Photography and the railway would come together
in one of the most far-reaching achievements of the pioneer years,
Eadweard Muybridge's famous Motion Studies, the precursor of cinema,
and the product of the wealth and the whim of the railroad baron Leland Stanford.
Muybridge's story exemplifies the surprising new possibilities of the modern world.
Born in the ancient market town of Kingston upon Thames,
his restless ambitions brought him to San Francisco,
a boom city, founded on gold rush wealth,
and sustained by the new transcontinental railway,
financed by Leland Stanford.
In this thoroughly modern metropolis, Muybridge established a reputation
with mammoth plate landscapes and spectacular panoramas,
including an eye-boggling 360-degree view of his adopted city.
Stanford came to Muybridge because he had a rich man's problem.
A passionate racehorse breeder,
he wanted to prove that a horse lifted all four feet off the ground when it trotted,
something that had evaded human perception for millennia.
This whole relationship between Muybridge and Stanford
I always think of as being proto-cinematic, essentially a director and producer relationship,
in that Stanford becomes very involved in the technology, and funds it and backs it,
and recruits these engineers and jockeys and other people to help Muybridge.
But Muybridge is the director.
The director's stage was Stanford's own private racetrack at Palo Alto.
0n a specially whited-out section of track
Muybridge placed a row of 24 cameras with electric shutters,
which would be triggered in sequence, four every second, as the horse passed by.
By this means, Muybridge did more than freeze the moment.
He took a scalpel to time itself.
(Solnit) Muybridge's photographs were the first source of accurate information
about the gait of a horse.
It's the beginning of this change
where the camera allows human beings to see faster than our own eyes,
to break down the world and to dissect motion.
And it's part of that kind of intrusion into the flow of time.
For Stanford, the project was always about horses,
whereas Muybridge understood that this was potentially about everything he could find,
and really create an encyclopaedia of zoological motion.
With his mastery of the material world,
the photographer was to the 19th century what the computer whizz kid is to the 21st -
scientist, artist, inventor, but most of all, an entrepreneur.
These people were in it for the money.
Once photography was invented,
you could say then the question is, "Well, what do we do with this?"
By the 1850s, commerce takes over,
and for the next half-century or more,
the overwhelming majority of photographs that are made
are made for a commercial reason.
And if you wanted to make serious money from photography,
this was the way to do it.
One important example of a major innovation in photographic technology
was the introduction of the carte de visite
a type of photography patented by a Frenchman named Disdéri in November of 1854.
As you stood for your portrait, you were photographed eight times in rapid sequence
by a camera that had eight lenses on it,
so you could have eight poses in the space of a few minutes.
And because these cards were small, they could be sent through the post.
Tens of thousands, millions of these cartes de visite
flowed back and forth between the New World, the United States, and Europe.
In effect, then, the carte de visite turned photography into a true industry.
(Haworth-Booth) People invest in photography because it could go anywhere, you know.
It has no fixed identity at this point.
People realise that it is going to be able to do all these other things.
It's going to be able to go to war,
to make documentary photography.
Of course, it's already tied up portraiture, its big scene.
But architects are beginning to use it,
because suddenly they had these very detailed views of monuments all over the world.
And so they could make money out of all kinds of different aspects of photography.
It was a global phenomenon.
Virtually since the day Daguerre made his announcement,
photography was being made all over the world.
People were shipping cameras and equipment to all the parts of, certainly, the colonised world.
So it was an incredible global phenomenon.
Photographers may have been quartering the globe,
but the heart of photography's empire remained the studio.
Right now we're in our skylight studio.
This is a studio that any 19th century photographer would love to work in.
It's beautiful light. It's consistent all day long.
Generally, in a 19th century studio, what you're looking for is what the artists look for, as well.
In the photographer's studio,
the public encountered modernity in all its intriguing, intimidating strangeness.
For the sitter to come to a photographic studio,
the experience was one of wonder.
To climb up three flights of stairs...
You're out of breath, you're not sure what's going to be in the studio.
They sit you down in a chair,
they bring a cast-iron headstand to keep your head steady.
Then they wheel a camera like this up to your face.
It's like a cannon being aimed at you.
Then you smell different smells.
You have the smell of ether.
You have the smell of alcohol, the smell of cyanide,
the smell of oil of lavender.
And all of these things are mixed together in a gumbo that is completely unfamiliar to you.
And then they say, "Try to have a natural expression."
(Laughs)
Natural expressions were not all that common in the 19th century.
But one photographer who mastered the difficult art was Gaspard-Félix Tournachon,
also known as Nadar.
This self-portrait is quite characteristic.
He's looking toward the camera quite... fairly directly.
You can't tell that his hair is red.
But he had red hair, and so he uses it.
When he opens a studio,
he reproduces his signature at large scale across the top of the facade of the building, in red.
And when he stamps the photographs of his, they're stamped in red.
Nadar is a made-up name. It's a professional name.
And he becomes famous. It's a sort of copyright, if you will.
And there is a famous lawsuit with his brother,
over whether or not the brother is allowed to use that name.
And so this is a man who knows how to put together a programme of publicity.
Nadar was the Andy Warhol of Bohemian Paris,
a celebrity artist who photographed up and coming stars
in a style that rewrote the rules.
His portraits of artists are unrivalled, because he's photographing them as equals.
He doesn't have to dress them up,
or put them in stupid settings with fake columns or huge thrones.
He just photographs them standing in his daylight studio,
looking totally authentic and wonderful,
which is why they're probably the best portraits of artists ever.
He doesn't attempt to flatter people.
He's unflinching in the way he looks at people, but he's never cruel.
But he always isolates his sitters. They're against completely plain backgrounds.
And unlike other photographers of the period,
there is nothing to indicate what a profession is.
A writer is not holding up a pen,
and a painter is not holding up a brush.
It's the force of personality alone that has to convey the character of the person.
When Nadar photographed Sarah Bernhardt, she was nearly unknown.
She's very young, quite wonderful looking because her face is very fresh.
And he wrapped some large piece of cloth around her
to isolate that beautiful neck and face.
And so there's really nothing else in the photograph except that.
It's no longer about how expensive a frock you can afford to wear to the sitting.
It's about how you can project yourself into another medium.
And so it's a way of assuring your own immortality, in part.
But whatever his personal status,
the status of Nadar's chosen profession was rather less certain.
In its first decades, photography had proved itself able to do almost anything.
But one doubt remained, then as now.
Is it art?
(Close) Here's the dilemma and the strength of photography.
It's the easiest medium in which to be competent,
but it's the hardest medium in which to have personal vision
that is readily identifiable.
There is no physicality to a photograph. There's nothing there.
Some silver that got tarnished in the development process
or some dyes in a colour print.
There is no physicality, there's nothing you can point to and say,
"This is the work of that artist's hands."
So, how do you make a photograph
that everybody immediately knows is the work of a particular artist?
Well, that's a very difficult and complicated thing,
you know, to come up with.
And when someone really ends up nailing down a particular kind of vision
to such an extent that they own that vision, you know they've really done something.
Photographers, anxious to prove the claims of their medium,
instinctively turned to painting in search of inspiration and reassurance.
I think photographers did plant their tripod feet
in the places where the easels of the painters had stood.
Roger Fenton went up one of the great Welsh rivers,
to the exact spot where Samuel Palmer had painted a few decades before,
and photographed the scene of the Palmer painting.
But it doesn't look the same. It's radically different, actually.
And you see it again and again in the leading pioneer photographers.
They are making sharp modern versions of old watercolours,
putting them through the gears into this new language.
But they also were responding to this strange ground glass they were looking at,
which was a very tight rectangle.
And they, of course, were looking at the world upside down and back to front,
and I think that encourages a degree of abstraction.
As you try to focus on some motif,
you look at it swimming around, not the right way round, upside down,
you kind of home in on big blocks of light and shade,
because you need to grasp something.
It's the genius of the medium itself asserting itself bit by bit.
But it wasn't just photographers who recognised the camera's new way of seeing.
Photography was also making an impression on real artists.
(Translator) There are several features which show, particularly with Degas,
that he looked at photographs, that he had been influenced by them.
In this framing, which cuts a person and the wheel of the carriage in half,
and where the real subject is pushed over to the right edge,
you can see neither the horses pulling it nor the coachman.
Clearly, it's very daring.
The way photographs captured the world
did help change the fine art tradition, progressive painting.
Bits of figures are just cut off,
and you get that same cutting off in photographs too.
So it has this sort of verisimilitude of a new way of looking.
You see the world as fragments, not these perfect wholes.
(Translator) He was also looking for a new kind of naturalness, of natural gestures,
for example, a hand in a pocket, which can mean just as much as someone's face.
That was something that he was able to see in the stereoscopic views,
which show people walking along boulevards
whose postures are recorded in a very natural way which had never been seen before,
the way someone held their umbrella, or put their hand in their pocket or turned their head.
Like this teacher, for example, leaning on his cane.
Or this young girl scratching her back.
It's the type of pose you could only see in the famous stereoscopic photos of the boulevards.
But even though he was influenced by it,
Degas never saw photography as anything more than a useful tool.
(Translator) Deep down, he had a contempt for photography,
like all artists who are real creatives.
For them, photography wasn't an art form.
It was despised because it was becoming totally commercialised.
Indeed, photography had become an industry.
This is the first photograph taken by the man who did more than anyone
to transform photography from a specialised craft, haunting the doorstep of art,
into a mass market industry.
It's a view of Rochester,
the home town of a young man called George Eastman.
(Gustavson) Initially, Mr Eastman was working in a bank as a bank teller.
He became interested in photography as he wanted to document a vacation he was planning.
He became more interested in photography than going on vacation. He never did go.
Eastman revolutionised photography by degrees,
first, by producing something we now take for granted, a roll of film.
But that was just the beginning.
A few years later, Eastman takes the same sort of concept
and remarkets it as an amateur camera called the Kodak.
(West) Kodak means nothing.
He was playing anagrams with his mother one night,
and somehow happened upon the word.
He liked it because he thought the letter K was a strong and incisive letter.
And it meant nothing.
So he thought, "What better way to sell the product
"than to have a name that people are going to remember because the letters are strong
"and because it's a name that has no alternate meanings,
"that hasn't trafficked in American society before?
"People will remember it because it's unique." And he was right.
Suddenly, photography has this great moment
when the Americans, as they are so brilliant at,
turn it into an area of mass production and factory standardisation,
and put it into the hands of everyone.
It's really simple in operation.
The string is used to cock the shutter.
- The shutter release is on this side. - (Clicks)
The famous slogan which we all remember. Erm... How does it go?
(West) "You press the button, we do the rest."
What it promises is all you have to do is a very, very simple act,
and we'll take care of everything.
We'll take care of the shipping, the developing, the printing.
We'll mail it all back to you and we'll include another roll of film
that we've already loaded back into your camera,
because with the first cameras, that's what you did.
You took your camera, you shipped it back.
They developed it for you, put in the new roll and then shipped it back to you.
To reduce the price of cameras, and actually promote it,
Eastman came out with something called the Brownie camera.
This is from 1900.
Very simple in operation. The little key on the top is used for advancing the film.
The lever is the shutter release.
Initially it was intended to be a child's camera.
It sold for one dollar. A roll of film for the Brownie was 15 cents.
Processing was 40 cents.
So obviously, from 25 dollars down to one dollar,
10 dollars down to 40 cents,
makes photography really available to just about anybody who wants to try it.
The Kodak revolution turned the empire of photography into a republic.
And the emblem of revolution
were the distinctive circular prints of the first generation of amateurs,
who were nicknamed the "Kodak Fiends".
No one was safe from the Kodak Fiends.
Not Nadar's son, Paul, who became the Kodak rep in France.
Not the first patron of the Royal Photographic Society,
snapped at Balmoral by her daughter-in-law, the photo-mad Princess Alexandra.
But Kodak didn't just change behaviour behind the camera.
It changed what was happening in front of it.
With snapshots in abundance,
people, for more or less the first time, looked the camera in the eye and said, "Cheese".
What the Kodak camera did was to make it fun, to make it an adventure.
And, as part of that adventure, the idea was take as many as you can,
because there's always more to be had, and we'll take care of the mess for you.
So the advent of the smile comes in, where all of a sudden now,
taking a photograph means enjoying yourself and capturing an enjoyable moment.
And people are encouraged, through Kodak ads, to smile at the camera,
rather than make it into a serious enterprise.
Along with the fun came experiments, discoveries and accidents.
In the hands of carefree consumers,
uninhibited by the aspirations of the artist or the perfectionism of the professional,
photography revealed its true nature as an open-ended, unruly medium.
The art of photography is created without theories,
and without a continuous artistic tradition,
but by amateurs who are making pictures,
discovering in the process, "Oh, I see it does that."
So then the next time, they have a chance to anticipate
how it might behave the next time.
And of course, that's what invented the history of photography in the '20s and '30s,
when the new art-minded people looked at these old pictures
and said, "I don't care whether that's art or not, I'm going to learn from it."
There are no accidental masterpieces of painting.
But there are accidental masterpieces in photography.
I have no idea who these people were.
It's a picture that turned up in a shoebox at a flea market.
But everything about the picture is absolutely perfect.
Even if you looked at it in terms purely of formal qualities,
it is absolute perfection.
The tones, the relations of the heights of the people in the photograph
against the sky and against the station wagon,
and the position from which the photographer is photographing the people
at a slight angle to the car, but the people are facing us directly. It's amazing.
I look at a picture like this, and if I'm ever getting jaded about what a photograph can do,
a picture like this shows me I'm wrong.
The amateur snapshot is merely one subcategory
in a genre of photography known as the vernacular.
This contains journalistic photography,
touristic photography, scientific photography, forensic photography,
insurance records, court documents,
passport photographs, postcards, boxing match records.
Every kind of photography, every use except art.
The vernacular contains some of photography's greatest naturally occurring riches,
a gift of the medium itself,
rather than a product of the genius of the individual photographer.
I was researching the history of New York City and I wanted an intimate view.
I wanted to see what people's apartments looked like,
not rich people, ordinary working class poor people, what they lived like.
When I first came upon these New York crime scene photographs, for example,
I thought, "Here's an unknown master."
These were like the tombs of the pharaohs. They'd been interred with all their possessions.
As I looked further into it, I realised that there were between four and seven people involved.
And furthermore, most of them seemed to be policemen
in the fingerprint and identification department.
They were taken with a very, very wide-angle lens, almost a fish-eye,
and so the body is in the centre,
often lit as if it were suspended in midair.
The camera's looking straight down,
and the curvature is such that you can see the legs of the tripod in the photograph.
And then out on the edges, on the fringe, there are the feet of the detectives.
And then there are the personal effects of the deceased, and they're all arrayed there.
And it couldn't be better if it had been planned.
Somehow, these men, just carrying out orders,
trying for full coverage of the area,
lighting as thorough as possible,
as much information in the frame as possible for forensic reasons,
somehow they'd evolved a great aesthetic style.
And that's one of the great wonders and mysteries of all this.
There is some kind of genius of the medium.
Photographers don't like to hear this, by the way,
but when you look at enough vernacular photography of diverse sorts,
you begin to think that it's the camera that's doing this work,
rather than the human operator, who's just the one pushing the button.
The paradox of photography, its unpredictable generosity and democratic inclusiveness,
is exemplified in the story of Jacques-Henri Lartigue.
Late in his life, Lartigue would be hailed as one of the founders of modern art photography.
In reality, he was the ultimate amateur who, in a remarkable series of family albums,
assembled a portrait of turn-of-the-century France
as it appeared to the eyes of a fun-loving boy from the age of eight to 18.
When you look through the pages of this album,
it's kind of a life of Lartigue,
told by Lartigue and shot by Lartigue.
That was, in fact, the core of his photographic work, these albums.
(Cordesse) He was from a wealthy family,
so he was lucky to have these opportunities.
And photography, we can say, is lucky to have found this little boy.
50 years after these pictures were taken,
Lartigue was discovered by the photographic establishment
and repackaged as a kind of primitive precursor
of cutting-edge photographers like Garry Winogrand,
who achieved by design what the child genius had discovered through instinct.
In fact, Lartigue's photographs are a testament to the rich culture of amateurism
which nurtured his precocious talent.
(Bajac) He has no style. I mean that he is quite a sponge,
that he is very sensitive to the spirit of the time.
When you look at the albums of Lartigue,
you really feel that these were taken by several photographers,
and you feel that really it's a kind of tribute to 20th century amateur photography.
It's the kind of work which would sum up all the amateur photography of the 20th century.
He is essentially a gifted amateur.
He's got access to all the best equipment, state-of-the-art equipment.
He has a father who's passionate about photography.
He is a subscriber to all of these magazines.
He's just got all of the advantages, but he's also, throughout his entire life,
you understand this about him,
that he understands the look of the world at any given moment,
he understands how things look, how women look at a certain period in time,
how to capture that essence of that moment, whatever form that's in.
(Cordesse) It was a very joyful family, you know. They had happy blood.
Anyway, they are always playing, we can see, even if they are here in Paris.
Country house or Paris or...
Always playing, and everyone jumping.
Striking though they are, Lartigue's pictures are not without precedent.
Instant photography, which arrested movement for humorous effect,
was a cliché of the amateur repertoire.
Lartigue simply did what everyone else was doing,
but with more flair and more daring.
(Translator) He wrote on this page of the album,
"Bichonnade also jumps for my snapshots."
Bichonnade was his cousin,
and this photograph, which has become very well known, really intrigued people.
They often asked him, "How did you do it?"
And he would tell them, "I didn't do anything. I just told her to jump."
(Moore) All the jumping and flying in Lartigue's photographs,
it looks like the whole world at the turn of the century is on springs or something.
There is a kind of spirit of liberation that's happening at the time,
and Lartigue matches that up with what stop-action photography can do,
and so you get these really dynamic pictures.
For Lartigue, the joke, part of the joke most of the time,
is that these people look elegant but they're doing these crazy stunts.
The exuberant gusto of Lartigue's snapshots is all the greater
when they are placed alongside what passed for serious photography at this time.
This was the era of what was called "Pictorialism".
Mean, moody and occasionally magnificent,
Pictorialism was photography at its most po-faced.
These very small, self-elected elites at the turn of the century
who tried to establish photography as a branch of the fine arts,
were recoiling from the vernacular explosion
that was actually the great creative achievement of that period.
And these elites, in order to establish this status,
withdrew into a very narrow world
that was imitating print making or drawing or things like that,
Whistler and Whistlerian-type art.
And it was an absolute artistic dead end.
Photography really merges with the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Everything is kind of marked out
against the world of the crude amateur snapshot and the commercial studios.
Stylistically, they retreated,
but also in terms of the content they retreated.
You don't see... I mean, it's very rare that you see an automobile or a machine,
or a poor person or a...
This is a fictional world of human harmony with nature and beauty.
So you'll have nudes and landscapes,
and thoughtful aesthetes sitting in their salons.
I mean, this is the typical range of these kinds of pictures.
When the modern world does appear
in the laboriously hand-crafted prints of the Pictorialists,
it looks as up-to-date as a rusting suit of armour.
The young Lartigue, meanwhile, was experimenting with his camera
to capture the heady excitement of this new age of speed.
I'm not disparaging them in the least,
but it seems as though the Pictorialists were trying to...
They were in quest of the past, if you wish,
and the vernacular photographers were already looking to the future.
But the future for everyone led here,
to the mud and slaughter of the Great War.
Many illusions about what it meant to be modern were also lost here,
and photography, a child of modernity, inevitably changed.
Edward Steichen, one of the leading American Pictorialists,
took up aerial reconnaissance photography.
Precision and sharpness, rather than arty vagaries, were now what counted.
Anyone who took a picture that was out of focus, said Captain Steichen,
should be court-martialled,
a philosophy he would apply in the '20s and '30s.
And in that period,
photography would find itself on the frontline of a violent ideological struggle
that would decide the fate of the world.