The First World War marked the triumph of the machine
over the merely human.
The high explosives, the machine guns, the tanks and planes
exposed the fallibility of humanity just as much as the folly of war had done.
When the war ended, people wanted to become more machine-like.
Houses became machines for living.
Writers became engineers of the human soul.
Chorus lines were fine-tuned like precision instruments.
And the rich and famous took on the sheen and style of sleek sports cars.
(Haworth-Booth) He makes people look as though their faces are made of aluminium.
You know, they become these sort of super-people,
sort of sleek and metallic.
In the age of the machine,
photography was seen as a machine-like process,
manufacturing objective truths, purged of subjectivity and emotion.
(Man) I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking.
Photography also became an organ of propaganda,
exploiting new technologies and techniques to reveal the shape of things to come.
This is the bit that's really fantastic.
You have this amazing fold-out, origami-style.
Our dear friend Stalin, of course.
But when the high hopes of the machine age
collided with the brutal political realities of the day,
photographers were confronted with the human cost of the utopias being proposed.
(Campany) Sander's a photographer who makes you pensive,
and that's what the Nazis couldn't stand about it.
And it was only by drawing on its past that photography would find its future,
not as a tool that made humans more machine-like
but as a medium that in troubled times documented what it meant to be human.
(Rubinfien) I sometimes feel that... that this woman is saying to me
that, "There's nothing you can do to help me, there's nothing you can do."
To hold a camera in your hands in the 1920s was to hold the future.
The photographer Berenice Abbott
felt the camera made her "the contemporary being par excellence".
Writer James Agee called the camera "the central instrument of our time".
Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy believed the camera offered a new vision
that would spark a 20th century renaissance.
"Anyone who fails to understand photography," he said,
"will be one of the illiterates of the future."
(Campany) The 1920s was perhaps the decade of the most intense debates,
as to what photography is for, what is it good at?
What role is it going to play in the art of the future, or even the society of the future?
But what language did photography speak? And whose interests did it serve?
The future or the past? The masses or the individual?
Society's or its own?
(Campany) Is it a medium that you need to wrestle with and take control of
or is it something that is perhaps at its best when art is reined in,
leaving the photographer as a sort of functionary, as a sort of operator?
In Germany, a nation struggling with the trauma and chaos of defeat,
photography offered clarity, rationality and order.
0ne of the surprise bestsellers of 1925 was Karl Blossfeldt's Art Forms 0f Nature,
which revealed in ravishing detail the precision engineering
that underpinned the vegetable world.
Karl Blossfeldt made huge compendious albums of different plant forms
and they're as heraldic as if they'd been made in cast iron.
They're quite extraordinary
and he ranges them side by side so you can see all the difference in the plant forms
and it's a kind of encyclopaedic desire to record the world as a series of typologies
using the new shiny commercial papers of the 1920s.
The potential for making systematic and accurate records
of places, people and things
had been one of photography's trump cards from the outset.
The first typology, Anna Atkins' Catalogue 0f Algae,
appeared just four years after the medium's invention.
Within a decade, photography was being used to record pond life of another kind,
the criminal underworld, catalogued by police mug shots.
Photographic typologies are still being made,
though methods have come on a bit since the 19th century.
Photographer Donovan Wylie spent a year photographing the British Army watchtowers
that once dominated the hilltops of Northern Ireland's bandit country in County Armagh.
Turn around there as much as you can without looking over the border,
and then we'll get the roads.
Golf 40 is scheduled for imminent demolition,
and Wylie is off to add it to his collection before it disappears.
(Wylie) The thing about typology is that it's about comparisons.
You only can get to know something if you can compare it against something else.
Wylie goes to enormous lengths to document the watchtowers
in the same lighting conditions, with the same framing, and from the same point of view...
which is where the army helicopter comes in handy.
(Wylie) When you photograph something from an elevated height,
it's a direct route to the object.
There's no... The photographers are removed from it.
All that filter's gone.
And with the towers, I realised that what I needed to do
was photograph them systematically at exactly the eye level with which they are at.
So if they're 300 metres up, I need to be 300 metres up looking at them dead straight.
That was a long process, because you have to work with pilots,
you have to try and make them understand because they always think you're insane
and, you know, "Why does it have to be so precise?"
A little bit higher, guys, a little bit.
That's super.
Typologies discipline photography's unruly tendencies
in order to create pure documents, just the facts and nothing else.
Bernd and Hilla Becher have been applying these methods to their chosen subjects
for nearly 50 years.
Blast furnaces, water towers
and the other bizarre creatures of the industrial landscape.
(Hilla Becher) It's like in zoology, you have the shape of a goat
but there are different kinds of goats.
And then you are surprised yourself, because you find things that you didn't expect.
For instance, you have a mining tower has the shape of an A,
but this A is different every time.
(Parr) They would be very rigorous in terms of the research they would do.
They would find out where the blast furnaces were,
they'd wait for the light to be, you know, clear but without sunshine.
Traditionally, in the pictorial sense,
people always think, "It's a sunny day, it's a nice day, let's go and take photographs."
But in fact you can see clearer, if you like, without the emotion of shadows and sunlight.
(Hilla Becher) My favourite subject is the blast furnace
because that's the craziest creature.
It has no similarities with anything else.
They look like animals, very strange animals, animals that you have never seen before.
Maybe they come close to octopuses.
But one of the most intriguing typologies was the human typology
created by August Sander in Germany in the 1920s.
Sander was a commercial portrait photographer
who had been working since the turn of the century
using old-fashioned glass-plate negatives.
But in 1929 he staked his claim as a modernist
when he published a selection of his portraits
under the all-encompassing title The Face 0f The Times.
(Meadows) There's a kind of Victorian thing going on.
This kind of collector, this obsessive collector,
how he took people and fitted them into a frame,
rather like, you know, an entomologist would take butterflies
and prick them out inside a glass box
and then stare at them.
The people were occupying the same amount of space in the frame, pretty much,
but you were instantly invited to work on the differences between everybody.
Sander's human typology used a system of categorisation
based on seven social types.
For example, you have the grouping of the farmers,
and then you have the subtitles "The young farmers"...
"The farmer's child and mother"...
"The farmer's work and life"...
"The head farmer"...
"And their sport".
For all its apparent rigour,
there's an oddball quirkiness to Sander's system.
(Meadows laughs)
They could well be farm workers who box in their spare time.
I would never have Sander written off as the dispassionate observer scientist.
You can't be, you know,
when you prick that... that butterfly with the pin,
you know, there's an electric charge there.
And it's just the same as when you press that shutter.
(Rubinfien) He shows you so much about how these people want to be seen
and at the same time so little about what's actually going on inside their minds.
And yet it's full of implications. It's full of hints.
There is all the way through Sander's best work
sense of a world that's pregnant with things that cannot be spoken of.
The unspoken that lies behind Sander's pictures
is the chaotic condition of Germany in the 1920s.
The Weimar Republic was a society in meltdown.
Hyperinflation, mass unemployment, political violence on the streets.
All of Sander's subjects would have lived with the consequences of that chaos.
(Rubinfien) Let's find the notary.
Here is this notary who stands erect, with his dog, in an overcoat.
It seems to me that the overcoat is perhaps the most eloquent thing in the picture,
and the reason why is that it would once have been an elegant coat,
but it's begun to lose its shape
and yet the notary fills it out as if he's an oak tree.
He fills it out as if it hasn't changed in any way,
and so to me what this is a photograph of
is a man who attempts to preserve his position, at least for the camera,
to say to the photographer, to say, to whoever is going to see this picture,
"I am no less than I always was which is a person you should respect."
One of the Sander photographs I love most is this picture of a woman
in her late 20s, perhaps early 30s,
and her baby and a little black Pomeranian dog, sitting in the grass,
and the child sits there hopeful and... and quite trusting,
with his apple there in the hands,
and then in the expression on the face of the mother
is knowledge of something much more,
something that she won't tell us about, something she can't tell us about,
and I sometimes feel, looking at the face of this woman,
about whom I know nothing other than... than this, what she shows me on her face.
I sometimes feel that this woman is saying to me, the viewer,
"There's nothing you can do to help me, there's nothing you can do."
Help me in what way, you know? Save me from what? Protect me from what?
In the Soviet Union, the realities were of another kind -
the revolutionary realities of a new society.
For the artist Alexander Rodchenko this was an opportunity to be embraced.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, he had declared painting to be dead
and had turned instead to photography.
Modern, objective,
apparently free from the taint of bourgeois subjectivity,
photography showed that artists could play their part
in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Alexander Rodchenko has this revelation about how the camera is the tool of the new man,
the new artist.
He invented a kind of special worker's uniform, which he wore,
and the camera goes with that desire to become the new intellectual, the new artist,
serving a larger political reality, serving the people directly.
But Rodchenko wasn't content with traditional approaches to photography.
A new society demanded new ways of seeing.
Fortunately, a new means of production had become available,
compact, hand-held, lightweight cameras like the legendary Leica.
(Haworth-Booth) In the Soviet Union, the still photographers are using the new Leica camera,
and using it with incomparable freedom,
with the freedom that that camera proposed, because it is so light.
And you can use it to photograph upwards, downwards, sideways.
Suddenly you're freed from the tripod and you can photograph in any direction,
so suddenly social life becomes fluid, as it were,
it becomes revolutionary.
(Campany) Rodchenko wrote about the need to reject
what he called "bellybutton photography".
He didn't mean photography of bellybuttons
but that most sort of amateur cameras are held at waist level with a viewfinder,
where you look down,
and so the entire world is seen from this view.
The alternative to bellybutton photography
was to try to make very apparent that you're photographing the world differently,
so that the viewer would be encouraged to take part
in a sort of revolution of... of perception, literally.
Radical photographic style was combined with cutting-edge graphics
in a magazine called USSR In Construction.
Designed by Rodchenko, it was a showcase of political propaganda,
glorifying the achievements of the Soviet system.
So this is the famous parachute.
And this is the bit that's really fantastic.
Yes, and then you have this amazing fold-out, origami-style piece,
but at the bottom, of course, what we're gonna find is, um...
our dear friend Stalin, of course.
This is not the deluxe edition, this is the ordinary edition,
because in the deluxe one this is physically a cloth or a paper parachute that sticks out.
It's even more dramatic than this.
But it's still pretty good.
USSR In Construction displays Rodchenko's mastery of photomontage,
a graphic technique that took its cue from cinema montage.
Rodchenko's photomontages treated photographs as raw footage,
suppressing their individuality, collectivising their energies,
cutting, pasting, retouching and rephotographing them,
to conjure up dizzying visions of the future.
But photomontage also shows up photographs for what they really are.
Mute documents, whose meaning remains fluid.
(Campany) There is in photography something quite radically open
in terms of the meaning of an image.
Meaning is something that usually needs to be pinned down from outside.
This is why photography has grown up with the caption.
This is why it's grown up with photojournalism.
Photography can serve, can be put at the disposal of a set of ideas,
a political ideology.
Its character as a functional record can be harnessed in one way or another.
Rodchenko harnessed photography to greatest effect
in an issue of USSR In Construction devoted to the White Sea Canal,
trumpeted at home and abroad as a triumph of Soviet engineering
and enlightened Soviet penal policies.
The canal would be built by criminals and other social undesirables
who'd be rehabilitated through labour.
Rodchenko travelled to the canal
to take the photographs that would provide the raw material
for this masterpiece of political propaganda.
So if we look at this picture,
we can see here in the Rodchenko book how the original looked.
Rather grey and flat here.
The montage - altogether much more successful as a picture.
And he's able to put in the text, give much more impact for this crowd of workers.
And of course this gets more impact in the way that he's given the contrast
and really heightened up the contrast between here and the backdrop.
You can see all these different components have been put together to make the picture.
And although when you look at this you wouldn't think it's particularly a montage,
it's only when you see the original
and you see how it's changed in its intention and its meaning
that you really understand how photomontage this is.
But Rodchenko's virtuoso post-production conceals a grim truth.
These determined-looking workers were mostly political prisoners
and the White Sea Canal a 140-mile-long gulag.
And far from being rehabilitated through their labour,
200,000 of them would die as a result of it,
a reality that can still be glimpsed in the unsmiling faces of the untouched original.
It's not clear how much Rodchenko knew about the realities of the White Sea Canal,
but a snapshot of his daughter Varvara, taken around this time,
suggests he knew all about the ambiguities of the camera's all-seeing eye.
She is shot from above,
and so she's looking up covering her eyes squinting up at the sun,
and then looming above her is the dark shadow of her father Rodchenko with the camera.
And yet all we see of him is this black shadow that's indistinct,
so there's both the mastery of vision and blindness
and the same thing with the little girl, that she's covering one eye as if she can't see
and yet she is being seen in such total clarity in the sunlight.
And it just seems to be about the camera itself
as this possibility of blindness and insight,
of amplified human vision and always the inability to see.
While Rodchenko struggled to photograph a new society,
in Paris another photographer was attempting to preserve one about to disappear.
Eugène Atget had spent 30 years documenting the city's ancient core
from backstreet to shop front
before it was swept away by redevelopment.
By the 1920s, when he was in his 60s,
Atget had assembled a unique typology of old Paris
consisting of more than 10,000 images.
This picture is probably one of my favourite pictures of Atget,
because of the construction of the image,
very... almost geometric, almost abstract,
and there are a few very small, little persons in the windows.
And... but he took the picture,
one of the reasons is because this place was going to be destroyed.
And it's not often that he writes things like that on the back of his pictures.
But here it is written, "va disparaitre". It's going to disappear.
(Chatter)
(Horse hooves on street)
Like August Sander, Atget was a creature of the 19th century.
His equipment and techniques, already old-fashioned when he began,
had become positively archaic by the 1920s.
Alexander Rodchenko would not have been impressed.
(Howarth-Booth) He was still making albumen prints
which you could print out in the sunshine, not in a darkroom.
You know, albumen prints came in in 1851
and he was still using them in the 1920s.
I mean, this is absurd.
Various people did try to get Atget to use modern materials,
because they said "It will last better",
and he said, "I don't know how to do that."
He may have been behind the times but Atget was still a commercial photographer.
0utside his studio in Montparnasse, a sign offered documents for artists,
reference material for illustrations and cartoons.
But however modest their intended purpose,
Atget's documents achieved something far greater.
(Meyerowitz) Un homme de travail, the maker of documents,
was an accurate description of the thing he did.
He produced a document.
A photograph is a document.
It's the first gathering of bits of data on a plane
that everybody could look at and see the same objects in.
But Atget's documents were much more personal.
Atget to me is our Mozart.
He is the single greatest artist of photography.
That's a clear definition for me.
He stands head and shoulders above everybody else.
Atget is the photographer's photographer.
Getting to the bottom of one of his pictures takes time and a bit of juggling.
(Meyerowitz) I decided once to sit with it and really look at it
because I wanted to know why he made this picture.
And as I looked at it, I did that thing that I often do with Atget,
which is to turn it upside down,
and when I turned it upside down, I suddenly saw this white strip.
It's probably a chimney flue that had been torn down
and the chimney flue was joined with the building backing it
and they've now cemented it up and it's fresh.
And on this street, this uninteresting, ordinary street,
Atget found that comment
of this white zipper... Zip! ...running right up the middle of the building,
and he makes his picture based on this little piece of flimsy marking,
and he's betting that the interested looker will really see that thing
and go travelling through the picture,
past the tree, around the lamppost, across the street,
and take his eye right up to that building and say...
(Slurps)... "That's delicious."
(Haworth-Booth) As he works during his long career, he notices these things going on.
Dusk, and early-morning light, and mist,
and sunlight crashing in from unexpected places.
But it's only towards the end that he gives himself up to these accidents
or these undocumentary possibilities of photography.
So he does become much more of a poet then.
You know, he's constantly photographing things
that are not sort of ordinary documentary photography.
You know, there's a huge tree right in front of the... the nominal subject,
like Notre Dame cathedral.
It's really a huge tree and bits of Notre Dame cathedral behind,
and the tree is very black and the cathedral is very sort of pale and grey.
So you could read it as the power of nature
against this great efflorescence of architecture.
They still are documents but they're documents of a different range of reality.
But while Atget cautiously explored the borderline
between one kind of reality and another,
a photographer with a studio on the same street in Montparnasse
was already pushing deep into the territory of the unreal.
For Man Ray, the camera was not a machine for making documents
but an instrument for exploring dreams, desires
and the medium's unconscious mind.
(Haworth-Booth) He was such a natural maverick in the photographic medium
that he almost effortlessly discovered all these ways to be a photographer
that no one had thought of before.
And they were so perfectly in tune with the moment of Dadaism and surrealism,
all these things like making photographs in the darkroom
just by sprinkling, scattering interesting objects on photographic paper
and then just switching the light on very briefly,
to allow the image... these objects to imprint themselves on the paper,
and then just developing it out, no camera involved.
He discovers this solarisation process, inadvertently, in the late 1920s,
and he makes people look as though their faces are made of aluminium.
They become sort of... as sort of sleek and metallic
as those mascots on the front of rather swish, fast cars.
They become these super-people, also slightly inhuman, slightly robotic.
Man Ray got in on the ground floor of the surrealist enterprise
thanks to his friendship with the artist Marcel Duchamp
and an early encounter with one of his most seminal works.
(Campany) Duchamp had left dust to gather on a sheet of glass,
on which he'd drawn various lines in lead,
and this was a stage,
one of the very many stages in the production of what became Duchamp's famous work,
his magnum opus, The Large Glass.
Man Ray had been asked to make some photographs of paintings,
so Duchamp said, "Why don't you practise on this sheet of glass?"
Man Ray was using quite slow film on a large-plate camera.
Very small aperture.
They open the shutter, go for lunch, come back, close the shutter.
Man Ray processes the film that night and he says the negative was perfect.
Dust Breeding delights in photography's infinite capacity for ambiguity
and mocks its obligations as a sober recorder of reality.
(Campany) We're not quite sure from where it's been taken.
There's no sense of scale, no reference to anything that we'd really be familiar with.
We're up, perhaps, above clouds, we're looking at some bleak terrain,
but it's being offered to us as something between an art work and a document.
If it's an art work, it's haunted by the idea of the document.
If it's a document, it's haunted by the idea of the art work.
In 1926, the surrealist and the maker of documents met,
an encounter between photography's past and present,
which would have a profound influence on its future.
(Howarth-Booth) Man Ray is the person who discovers Eugène Atget.
They lived in the same street so he didn't have far to go to find this old man,
who was then in his late 60s.
(Barberie) Man Ray bought about 50 of Atget's photographs
and sparked something of a fashion for Atget's work in avant-garde circles in Paris.
The surrealists were interested in the idea of found objects.
A found object was something that you would come across, any sort of everyday object,
whether it was mysterious or very familiar,
and taken out of context, found out of context, it would somehow appear very strange
and could disrupt your... your mental state or your psychic state,
and thereby sort of project you into another consciousness
or another understanding.
Old photographs were terrific found objects for the surrealists,
full of people and things that nobody knew about,
nobody knew what they were or who... who they were.
Atget himself, with his archaic equipment and techniques,
was a kind of living, breathing found object,
which is how Berenice Abbott, a young American photographer,
and one of Man Ray's many assistants,
pictured him when she took his portrait in 1927.
(Reynaud) He came, unusually elegant...
(Chuckles)... compared to what she was used to seeing,
and he had a big coat
and so there is one portrait when he's standing,
one when he's seated in front of her, and then one in profile.
This one is the one in profile, and that's the one she preferred.
I think that in a way she liked it because he looked like an old man,
and for me that's part of the myth that she has built a little bit,
that Atget was a... you know, an old poor photographer,
selling his pictures for nothing.
I guess part of the greatness of Atget is his utility to all kinds of photographers.
He's capable of recognising the great broth of details
that the world offers at any given moment,
the hard fact of it, and yet the elusive nature of details.
The elusive lends itself towards the surrealists,
and the factuality lends itself towards those
who are, you know, deeply connected to all the minutiae of life.
The world's least likely surrealist died a few months after his discovery.
By then his documents had been appropriated by Europe's avant-garde.
In 1929, they were shown alongside works by Man Ray and others
at the influential Film And Photo show held in Stuttgart.
(Parr) '29 was a phenomenal year for photography.
You had the famous Film And Photo exhibition. Which I'll show you the catalogue for.
So it was really like a defining moment.
The statement, really, about where photography had gone.
- Who have we got in there? - Well, there's Bayer,
Man Ray from Paris,
Hannah Höch,
Edward Weston,
Atget,
Lissitzky,
Moholy-Nagy,
Piet Zwart, a designer,
and in fact even the British Cecil Beaton gets a look-in.
Interestingly, we are virtually excluded,
because Britain was quite asleep, during the '20s, if you like, photographically.
The action was in Germany and Russia.
But in Russia and Germany, the action was about to take a sinister turn.
Stalin's Great Terror, unleashed in 1934, had created a legion of the damned...
heroes of the Soviet Union now declared enemies of the people.
First they were liquidated, then removed from history.
Propaganda publications had to be kept up to date, as arrest followed arrest.
Alexander Rodchenko, the master of montage,
who could turn gulag slaves into rehabilitated workers,
was now forced to doctor books that he himself had created,
using black ink to turn apparatchiks into un-people.
(Nyman) These were the photographs that Rodchenko had been commissioned to make
and the book that he'd been commissioned to make,
and that he had been forced, either actively or passively, to... to destroy.
It becomes a diary of repainting, of obliteration,
of destroying your work by adding to it.
The interesting thing is that you naturally concentrate on the kind of face area,
but then, actually, if you look at the kind of shoulders and the position of the body,
the unobliterated area, which is the clothes and the shoulders, and parts of the body,
you know, still seem to proclaim the human being underneath the obliteration.
In Germany, humanity was facing obliteration of another kind.
August Sander,
who could give a black circus performer as much human dignity as a burgomaster,
inevitably fell foul of those who were planning a master race.
The Nazis had their own idea of what photographic typologies were for,
cataloguing racial types, for example.
A government that prized sameness,
and prized a certain highly idealised version of what its people ought to be,
simply could not stand all of the idiosyncrasy that you see in Sander's pictures.
Every one of his people is frail, flawed,
human, highly imperfect, troubled, worried.
That's not to the world of the master race. Absolutely not.
The Nazis banned Sander's book and the printing plates were destroyed.
But the further Germany descended into its collective madness,
the harder Sander clung to his typology.
The Nazis may have had no place for him in their system
but he made a place for them in his.
(Gerd Sander) When the National Socialists came to power in 1933,
he also felt that it was his duty to document these people too.
He photographed these people with the same clarity as he did anybody else,
as he did with the Jewish people who came to him.
And the images you see in the books, the persecuted Jews,
what many people don't realise, they were passport pictures.
People came to Sander to get their passport picture done for immigration.
So this is 1938 and this is Persecuted Man.
And again, the hands tell a lot, don't they?
All his fingernails are bitten, and his hand's all scrunched up.
And then his son.
It takes a while, you know, to decode,
to find that this is his son... his son Erich, but there he is.
Sander's son Erich was a communist.
When he was arrested in 1934,
Sander arranged to have his photograph taken in his prison cell.
He died, still a prisoner, ten years later.
Sander photographed his death mask.
It appears in the category called The Last People.
America in the 1930s was in the grip of its own crises.
Walker Evans, one of the greatest photographers of the era,
used his camera to lay them bare.
(Galassi) This is an image of American identity, of democracy,
of all these people, each one, each individual the same size,
and therefore each individual having the same importance
and everybody's there together.
You can think of it as a positive thing in that way
or you could also think of it as a horribly rigid grid-like structure
in which each person is isolated in their own little cell
and that nothing will ever change.
That's the genius of Walker Evans, that he's pretending that he's just giving you the facts.
But he's, in fact, by the choice of the facts,
influencing how you understand the world.
In an age of utopias, Walker Evans was a dissident voice.
"To hell with the liberals, intellectuals, artists and communists,"
he wrote in his diary at this time.
"Human society is a failure."
According to the writer James Agee,
Evans' allegiance was "to the cruel radiance of what is".
(Rubinfien) The straightforwardness of his photographs is deceptive.
It's like the silence of the detective, the silence of the inquisitor,
who, by saying less, forces the subject to speak too much
until the subject breaks and reveals everything.
As a young man, Evans had wanted to be a writer.
Like many others, he went to Paris to serve his apprenticeship.
He spent his time failing to write
while effortlessly absorbing the latest trends in avant-garde photography.
When he returned home he began to photograph in a style
straight from the pages of the Film And Foto catalogue.
But he found his own distinctive voice thanks to an old master.
Eugène Atget,
5,000 of whose negatives had been brought over to America by Berenice Abbott.
When he saw this work, Evans put aside his hand-held camera
and began working, like Atget,
with an old-fashioned, large-format view camera.
It slowed him down but made him look more closely.
(Rubinfien) If we try to understand what Walker Evans took from Atget,
it would have been an understanding of how the object, the things people make,
how those things are immensely evocative
of the lives of the people to whom they're... they're attached.
All the way through Atget,
every tablecloth, every pillow, every pair of shoes, is its owner.
And Evans saw this and extended it directly into his own work.
In 1935, Evans, along with a number of other leading photographers,
was commissioned to produce propaganda images for the Farm Securities Agency
set up to ease the effects of the Depression in rural America.
Since these photographs were taken at the behest of the government
in order to support government relief efforts,
there's an obvious strategy involved to portray the government in a very positive light.
Not only the government. More important than the government were the recipients of relief.
So the most famous examples occur
with the idealisation of the Dust Bowl refugees, for example,
in the photography of Dorothea Lange,
in which, in the six photographs in the series, she proceeds to reduce the size of the family,
which is identified in her captions as seven people,
down to three young children, one of whom is an infant,
and thereby the family suddenly conforms to middle-class standards on family size.
0ne of Evans' classic images shows the gulf
that separated him from mainstream FSA photography.
(Haworth-Booth) The great documentary portrait by Walker Evans from the 1930s
is the one of Allie Mae Burroughs, a sharecropper's wife, in Alabama in 1936,
and she's shown against the weatherboarded house that she lived in,
and her face is as weathered as the wood.
You can see that her eyes are screwed up against fairly fierce southern light
and it's the same sort of fierceness of the camera lens.
There's no Vaseline involved and no muslin. It's just sheer direct fact.
(Thompson) This was a young woman who's probably had bad teeth
so she wouldn't want to smile in a way that would show them.
But the thing that interests me so much about the picture, the picture was taken in 1936,
and by then he was an accomplished master at composition,
And yet he was willing to give over part of the authorship of the picture to her,
because what she did when he got that close really determines what the picture is.
It's not an easily readable emotion.
It's not an illustration of an idea about who these people were,
It's an actual encounter between one subject in front of the camera
who has equal human presence as the person behind the camera.
But though he aspired to the directness of an Atget or a Sander,
Evans' understanding of documentary photography was more complex.
For this sophisticated Jazz Age intellectual,
there was nothing simple about a photographic document.
(Galassi) Documentary had come to mean two things.
It... it meant that it was delivering the truth
and that it was a social agent, it was gonna make life better for everybody.
Of course, Evans hated both of these ideas.
And the reason why he kept insisting on calling it documentary style or documentary aesthetic
was precisely to make the point that it just looks like the facts, it isn't objective.
When Evans photographed the Burroughs house,
the complexities and contradictions of his documentary style were revealed.
Evans didn't simply record what was in front of him.
He rearranged the scene to minimise the squalor,
elevating simple objects into iconic symbols of domesticity,
and as he worked, the photograph crossed the line from document into art work.
The writer James Agee, who was with Evans when the picture was taken,
provides a sidelight on the artifice behind this seemingly artless image.
I think one of the most stunning quotes in all of Agee's work
is when he says that the woman of this household told him,
"I hate this house so bad,
"it seems like there ain't nothing I can do to make it pretty."
And that to me stands in great contrast to Evans's work inside that cabin on one day,
when he did indeed make things achieve a kind of clarity and simplicity and beauty
that he thought best represented American life.
But though Evans readily moulded reality to fit his personal vision,
he couldn't make that vision conform to the propaganda requirements of the FSA.
In 1937 he was sacked.
By then the high hopes of the 1920s had given way to the low dishonesty of the 1930s,
and after that came total war.
And when the killing machines returned,
one photographer documented the effects on vulnerable humanity
from the no-man's-land of ambiguous truths and elusive facts.
For British photographer Bill Brandt,
coupling close observation with unabashed artifice was second nature.
He'd made his name working within the documentary disciplines
of photo magazines like Picture Post
but he'd also walked on photography's wild side, in the Paris studio of Man Ray.
(Hodgson) Late in life, Brandt and Man Ray were reintroduced to each other.
Man Ray at some point asked Bill Brandt what he'd learnt while he worked as his assistant.
And Brandt said, "Well, not very much while you were actually present
"but you went out so much that I used to rifle through your drawers
"and I learnt a great deal while you weren't in the studio."
What he did learn from Man Ray, the surrealist pleasure in quirky juxtaposition,
but also in understanding that a picture can be like a sculpture,
that it can represent nothing more than the artist's desire to represent something.
I think that there's more directing in these pictures than one imagines.
They're not straight reports,
and certainly we know from one or two of them where there are variant images
that people who looked like they were asleep in one picture were not asleep a frame later.
So that, clearly, Brandt was asking people to participate in a mise en scène,
which is for information purposes
as well as honestly recording what he found there.
Of course, Brandt is the great inventor of that strange halfway house
between truth and fiction.
(Howarth-Booth) Bill Brandt sees this new kind of social dislocation in surrealist terms.
Surrealist episodes unfolding in London during the blackout and the Blitz.
Suddenly this is a dream city where there is no illumination except the moon.
And suddenly there are all these railway stations packed with people,
only they're asleep.
In an age of machines and machine-like ideologies
photography had found its own future by reaching back into its 19th century past.
And by preserving the human in inhuman times,
photography had apparently proved
that it was a humanistic rather than a mechanistic medium...
a claim that would be tested in the years that lay immediately ahead.