(Chatter)
Two photographers are on the road.
Martin Parr and John Gossage make very different kinds of pictures.
But the idea of a photographic journey is at the heart of what they both do.
- What's that about? - Yellow ribbon.
- Oh, yellow ribbon. Stop. - Stop.
What's the significance of the yellow ribbon?
It came out of the Iranian hostage situation.
They're in the middle of a five-day shootout,
a photographic exploration of the Mississippi Delta in Memphis,
one of the most iconic cities in the American South.
The things that catch their eyes aren't the ones the average tourists would choose.
- I'm gonna wander round the back. - All right.
- See you in ten. - Yeah.
(Parr) I have a responsibility as a documentary photographer
to photograph the times that we live in, what the world is about now,
and particularly in America it is about the big chain shop,
about the big sort of Walmart or whatever it is.
My job is to try and capture what's going on.
Now, if you get a great photo as well, that's a bonus.
(Gossage) I look at it and say, "I think there's something to be done here."
And it tends to be places where...
no other photographers I know ever think that there's anything worth doing.
The American photographer Garry Winogrand once said that he took photographs
to see what the world looked like photographed.
Photographers have always had this as their mission statement.
But the three decades from the 1950s onwards
were the real golden age of photographic journeys.
Fuelled by existential restlessness, baby-boomer wanderlust, and cheap petrol,
the photographers lit out for new territories
to see what these worlds looked like photographed,
and this is what they discovered.
The desert.
The open road.
The city street.
The beach.
The suburban nowheresville.
The man-altered landscape.
These are the places that photography owns,
and this is the story of the journeys photographers made to claim them.
Photography always wanted to be on the move,
even before the technology was really up to it.
When Timothy 0'Sullivan penetrated the deserts of the American West in 1867,
he brought his darkroom with him, pulled by four mules.
Around the same time, the Bisson brothers employed 25 porters
to haul their equipment up the face of Mont Blanc,
processing fragile glass-plate negatives in a darkroom tent
thousands of feet above sea level.
The technology has come a long way since then,
but any photographic journey worth making still demands blood, sweat and tears.
(Adams) They say that Timothy O'Sullivan was a master at profanity,
and I can believe it.
The actual physical work of getting out is often fairly arduous. It involves a scramble.
It involves risking snakes and swatting at the bugs. So it... it is a struggle.
But when you get to the top of the... of the ridge,
you've got a whole new scene to work with, and it's thrilling.
It's the greatest satisfaction you're gonna have all day.
So, no, it's... it's the view,
uh... stupid.
(Chuckles)
(Roma) It's an excuse to be in the world, really.
Not just looking. That's the crazy part of it. It's being in the world.
This is something I do. I take walks with my camera.
And I'm reminded of things.
I'm reminded of things that I didn't even know I knew, for instance,
because I'm... I'm engaged in the world.
I have known this field for the last 45 years.
And there's something about this field that I've always loved.
- (Humming engine) - Isn't this wild? Oh, shit.
This is what I was telling you about before.
Now, that's part of why I'm interested in this field
because I'm gonna photograph nature in all four seasons,
and then these skydivers coming down, deus ex machina, you know? It's sort of like...
Oh, here he comes.
- (Shutter clicks) - There. He's in the frame there.
The history of photography is made up of journeys great and small,
some as epic as a continent, some no longer than a city street.
But few have been as influential as one taken by Robert Frank.
It produced a book of photographs that laid bare the soul of 1950s America.
The seminal person, absolutely, after the war is Robert Frank.
The Americans is one of the most extraordinary paper movies that's ever been made.
Born in Switzerland to Jewish parentage,
Robert Frank brought an outsider's perspective to bear
when he embarked on a nine-month road trip of his adopted home in 1956.
Frank got a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel around the United States
and document the kind of culture that he saw evolving here
which he believed was... was spreading elsewhere.
He started in New York, travelled south to South Carolina,
then on to Texas, to California, then back to Chicago
and finally ending up back in New York.
(Westerbeck) There was a continuity to the way he travelled.
It's not the hop, skip and jump of the world-travelling Cartier-Bresson.
He got in a car, he saw the whole thing and he shot every place.
Frank's journey produced the photographic equivalent
of the Great American Novel,
laying bare the anxieties that the chrome and the advertising jingles obscured.
Though he'd been trained in a rigorous Swiss tradition
that aspired to photographic perfectionism,
Frank's freewheeling odyssey
echoed the spontaneity of abstract expressionist art and Beat poetry.
(Westerbeck) He doesn't give a damn if the verticals are straight up and down or not,
because he's literally standing in the middle of the picture he takes of,
and, of course, Jackson Pollock stands in the middle of the paintings he makes too.
Again, it's... The kind of zeitgeist of abstract expressionism, that freedom,
that release from the conventions of picture making
that were earlier is there with Frank.
Kerouac described it, I think. What did he... He... he called Frank's qualities agility,
um... mystery,
sadness, genius,
and secret strangeness,
and I think those really are the qualities that are there everywhere in those images.
At the end of his road trip, Frank had nearly 700 rolls of film.
He brought his final selection to the French publisher Robert Delpire,
and they set about designing a photo book
that would become one of the foundation stones of modern photography.
(Delpire speaks French)
(Translator) He came back to me with a selection
and we very quickly did the layout of the book.
People always imagine you need two or three weeks to do that.
We did it in one day.
We spread the whole book out on the floor, as you always did at that time, on all fours.
As there were no double-page spreads, just one picture after the other,
we quickly agreed how the photos should be displayed.
And that's how we did it.
He doesn't want you to be distracted by the book.
In fact, he doesn't want you to look at more than one picture at a time.
He doesn't want the eye to jump around.
He wants you to take each one in, so that as you turn the page
that little retinal retention will superimpose one picture on the next one.
Frank wants you, as with a movie projection, to be going through at the same speed
so that the subtlety of the pictures is what will accumulate and make the movie,
not the mechanical push-pull of the design of the book.
(Sinclair) He gives structure very, very cleverly,
by starting each chapter with an American flag.
And it's the flag that obscures the human face, from the very first image in the book,
the flag is more important.
Along with the American flag there is a... a series of crosses
hidden, coded into it all the time.
There's a picture of a Jehova's Witness
and behind him in the stonework is a cross so that he becomes a crucified figure.
So you've got those two symbols as the basic grammar of the book
and it becomes the story of flags and hats and cigars and jukeboxes.
And you realise the whole book is a narrative,
a kind of narrative of... of optimism that's died.
The show is over, and Frank understands that beautifully.
The book appeared in France in 1958
and a year later in America with an introduction by Jack Kerouac.
The critics hated what later generations of photographers came to revere.
(Speaks French)
(Translator) It was very badly received, something you doubtless know.
It didn't go down well in America, where the critics said,
"Who is this insignificant Swiss descending on the Americans,
"coming to explain to them
"that the American way of life isn't as extraordinary as people say?"
It was like that.
We lost money, but it wasn't that big a deal.
The kind of book that I do loses money all the time...
so I wasn't surprised.
As if the corrosive poetry of Robert Frank wasn't bad enough,
America also had to contend with the anarchic energy of William Klein.
OK, all right, let's go.
I have exactly six minutes.
If Frank is a moody blues, then... then Klein is bebop.
I mean, his rhythm is a lot faster.
What else do you want to know? How much money I make?
He's always on the offensive, being aggressive,
and trying to provoke a situation and being absolutely fearless.
Klein came back to his native New York in 1954
after a six-year sabbatical in Paris where he'd trained as an artist.
But this was no prodigal's return in sackcloth and ashes.
(Man) How did New York strike you?
(Klein chuckles) How did it strike me? Right between the eyes.
New York was shitsville, you know?
It wasn't such a hot... it wasn't such a big deal.
Can we say on television that he said he wanted to give America a kick in the balls?
- Cos I think that's what he said. - (Man) Yeah, sure.
America's so full of shit. You've got that?
(Both laugh)
(Horn sounds)
For a photographer of Klein's aggression and energy,
there was one perfect outlet, the street.
(Westerbeck) Photography discovered its inherent subject in the street.
The landscape photographers and the portrait photographers
were in some ways more stymied
because there was an enormous tradition there that they were trapped in.
But the photographers who work on the street, who are willing to wing it, to risk it,
make amazing discoveries.
(Chuckles) My photographs were... were given to the corner drugstore
and they came back, you know, thumb-marked, smudged, and out of focus.
I thought, "Well, that's typical, of course. That's the kind of photograph I took."
But when I had access to a darkroom and enlarged the photographs myself,
I realised that the photographs weren't all that bad
and you could do something with 'em.
I could frame them differently, I could print them differently and so on.
And that was the first time I realised that I could do something with photography.
The street had always been an alluring place for photographers.
But to start with, at least, it had proved to be elusive.
Pioneer photographers could record the architecture easily enough,
because it kept still.
But the life of the street moved too fast for the long exposure times.
In this Paris street scene by Louis Daguerre,
only the shoeshine man and his client stayed still long enough to leave a trace.
So the first street scenes show artfully staged setups...
or what look like post-apocalyptic ghost towns.
Gradually the technology caught up.
Citizens evolved from blurs to all-too-solid flesh.
But the camera's struggle to keep pace with life on the streets left a rich legacy,
a visual language of blurs and grain that is unique to photography.
It is a language of stutters and stammers, but Klein made it eloquent.
I like this photograph a lot, it's maybe one of my favourite photographs...
(Chuckles) ...because I didn't know what I was doing.
I was in the suburbs somewhere, in some wasteland,
and these kids were fooling around, and I said, "Dance," and they danced.
And it's only the next day that I realise that I get this kind of blur,
a Picasso-like hand,
a kid that some television guy once said, "Oh, I like that kid with the beard,"
and that's what I... that's what I like about photography.
You can overexpose, underexpose, you can make everything cockeyed.
But it's not something you would do if you're doing a...
if you're drawing a portrait or... or painting a portrait,
and that's what's interesting in photography, it's the accidents.
(Quentin Bajac) You can think of Klein as perhaps the first pop photographer.
Klein isn't interested in the image in itself,
but he is interested in the way this image can be arranged,
cropped, put in different contexts.
He considered them as raw material.
It's kind of found footage of modern life that he takes into his... into his books.
Everyone is a kind of actor in front of William Klein's lens.
Everything turns into a kind of show.
Did people mind when you took their photograph?
(Chuckles) Oh, they loved it. This is New York, you know.
There used to be a programme called, uh... King For A Day
and in New York everybody thought somebody's gonna call them up
and say, "Hey, Mr Zussbaum, how would you like to be king for the day?"
(Chuckles) "No problem."
Klein had acquired his first camera in a card game at the age of 18,
a casual acquisition that would characterise his whole approach to photography.
Trained as a painter in postwar Paris, he felt no respect for photography's sacred cows.
(Klein) I didn't really dig the French photography.
You know, all these photographers that now everybody reveres
like Doisneau and even Cartier-Bresson,
completely chic and polite
and sentimental and romantic,
and humanistic.
So I said, "Well, fuck that."
Klein's idea of a photographer was Arthur Fellig,
alias Weegee the Famous, the legendary New York tabloid photographer.
(Klein) I dug Weegee.
He had a... a police radio in his car
and he would go running to the police station
and he'd... he'd photograph all these dead Mafia people and so on.
And he had a big 4x5 camera
and a big cigar and a big mouth.
But he was a real New York icon and he was great.
(Luc Sante) He was the... the photographic eye of the New York City working class.
He was the voice of the people. He is their poet.
He's very fond of taking pictures of crowds, crowds in all kinds of situations.
Crowds looking at car accidents, crowds looking at movies.
He identifies with the crowd very strongly
and they are not reserving their emotions, they're not trying to be cool.
You see every emotion flickering across their faces,
and Weegee is part of that crowd,
he just happens to be looking at them and poking a camera in their direction.
Like his tabloid hero, William Klein cruised the sidewalks,
jabbing his wide-angle lens at whoever crossed his path.
This is a photograph that I happened on in the street,
I saw two kids playing cops and robbers,
and I said to one of them who had a gun, I said, "Hey, look tough."
(Westerbeck) Klein has managed to provoke him to an exasperation
where the kid just takes the gun and sticks it right into the lens of the camera.
It's so much inside the camera range that it's out of focus.
There's a child in profile also, who's sweet and also quite confused-looking,
and much more intimidated by the whole situation
and this kid is a little caught in the crossfire.
He makes the picture.
I felt at that moment that it was a self-portrait,
because I was this kid and I was this kid.
I was timid and afraid of everything,
and then I was also a kid who came on pretty strong, and I would get into fights and so on.
So I was both.
(Gossage) Great book maker.
I mean, he is probably the most internationally influential of any single book maker.
I mean, Frank would have never cut up pictures
and put like six on a page and some in ovals or anything.
He would never have been that playful either.
In the '60s, it opened up for photographers all round the world
to do their city books with the same energy.
The one thing Klein had more than anything else is energy.
He got New York too. On top of it, he got the subject.
It was the right city to have that degree of energy.
(Shutter clicks)
To this day, the sidewalks of New York tempt the ambitious street photographer.
If you can make it there....
(Meyerowitz) Fifth Avenue is an addiction.
Once you get the drift of it and feel the energy of it,
it makes you want to go back again and again, because it's where life seems to be.
Going out to this street, being in this river of humanity,
and seeing unexpected incidents occur,
how do you make the moment yours?
How do you become courageous enough
to step into the space and take the picture out of it
and learn how to confront the oncoming flow of people
and insert yourself into it?
Joel Meyerowitz has spent 40 years answering these questions
ever since he threw over a career as an art director after seeing Robert Frank at work.
I have a show coming up and we're publishing a book, and I've got to get this book out,
and this is a dummy, miniature images,
so I could make a maquette to see how the book works.
I've been actually working on this maquette for a couple of weeks,
and if you see anything that you think I should change, you tell me.
Six.
Ten.
To start with, Meyerowitz' ambitions, like so many others,
were defined by Cartier-Bresson's much imitated, much misunderstood theory
of "the decisive moment".
At that time I was interested in capturing an event,
because I didn't know any better and that was the language of the period.
Something happened in space and time,
you tried to be there and make an interesting shapely picture about it.
I saw myself as a visual athlete. You know? The ball comes.
(Clicks tongue) The glove is in the right place at the right time.
For... for example, this is a catch picture,
walking on the Pont Neuf or something like that,
and a man is walking his black-and-white capuchin monkey,
a woman is coming along, in black-and-white, of all things, with her baby in there,
and the two of them are seeing each other.
Or, you know, just catching a pair of giant shoes walking along the street,
with people in them,
and they run into a girl on crutches, who's got a... a leg in a cast,
and she does this high kick for them.
I mean, I couldn't have planned that.
It's a kind of lunacy, you know?
Every camera has a clock on it.
It says a second and it says a thousandth of a second
and you can choose to work within those time constraints
and you actually can experience time.
If you know a thousandth of a second...
(Tuts)... you can begin to believe that you see things in that split second
and if you believe it, you'll begin to see it.
(Horn sounds)
One of the great lessons for me was,
having absorbed Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment",
there came a point when I had to reject it
and reimagine it somehow in New York.
Cartier-Bresson's Europe had the sweet organisation of Parisian streets
and parks and squares and the elegance of it and the low scale of it.
New York is sizzling with energy.
It's skyscrapers and steel and glass and marble
and it glitters and it's dynamic.
But big as it is and dynamic as it is, people are rubbing up against each other all the time.
They know each other's space.
They can pass within, you know, inches of each other without touching,
So it's full of beautiful paso dobles. It's all this kind of bullfighting stuff that people do.
And within that is the kind of sexy sense of intimacy.
We come close to each other.
I mean, I like the idea of coming in real close to somebody
and, by a gesture or a head turn,
sort of dissuade them from thinking I'm photographing them.
So their... their mindset says, "He's not interested in me,"
and so they go blank to me.
When Meyerowitz first began photographing in the early 1960s,
Fifth Avenue was a happy hunting ground
for some of the greatest names in contemporary photography.
Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus worked these streets,
as did Garry Winogrand,
who became a kind of pack leader
for a generation of hungry young street photographers.
He invited me to his place on 93rd Street in the West Side.
He said, "Come on up some time, I'll show you some photographs."
Great. I went probably the next day, and what I saw was so astonishing.
In his house there were stacks of photographs.
Lf... if each of these boxes holds 250 prints
Garry had stacks that were about hip high,
so that is probably 1,500, 2,000 prints in a stack.
And there was a stack here and a stack there and a stack...
I mean, they were all over the place.
And I remember I came into his living room,
and I sat down in his rocking chair and he gave me...
He said, "Here, take a look at these.
It was amazing to just flip through them.
The wild wit of Garry Winogrand was everywhere evident.
It wasn't that I saw a style or a technique, but I saw the generosity and the spirit,
and I thought to myself, "That's it, it's an appetite for life."
(Roma) You couldn't feel sorry for yourself around Garry Winogrand. You just couldn't.
When people would go off on these trips
and there's this whole sob story of going... I think it was to Mexico
and then, oh, he got dysentery
and then it was too hot, and it was this and it was that,
and Garry just spoke right over this poor guy
and said, "It sounds like you're talking about your own comfort,"
which in New York speak is to say, "Let's move on from there."
You know, it's... What does your own comfort have to do with anything?
He was the godfather in some ways.
(Meyerowitz) He was always driven. He was always obsessed.
When I first met Garry,
what I remember is sitting there after he handed me these pictures.
He was smoking, he was drinking and he was shaking and tapping.
So that he was tap-tap-tap. His feet were tapping and his knees were shaking.
I mean he was like... he was this engine that was throbbing.
It was a kind of nervous energy.
(Eileen Hale) Things responded to his energy.
Photographers who photographed with him have said,
um... that things were always happening when he was around,
and he'd stop to reload and they'd stop.
And he'd be fully reloaded and ready to go and everything would start happening again.
He was perfectly willing to leer at women, with his camera and without, I suspect.
They are about a certain kind of male looking that does go on.
But at the same time he also, I think, had a feeling
for what kind of woman would respond more positively,
sometimes sexiness, but sometimes a kind of just bravado "Back at you, buddy."
You know, "You want to leer at me? I can leer at you too.
"And I'm not... you know, I'm not embarrassed by being gorgeous and female
"any more than you are by being, you know, overweight and a man."
Winogrand found some of his richest raw material in the zoos of New York.
When I first met Garry, he was just going through a divorce, a separation,
and he had two young kids.
And on the weekends in particular he would take 'em to the zoo.
And we would just go and hang out with the kids.
They would run around and look at the animals, and Garry was looking at the animals.
(Roma) You know, you could smile all through the book. They're animals and you see them.
And then you stop and think, you know, they're heartbreaking photographs.
It's a photograph of the European brown bear
and it's a sign describing what the bear is
and all you see of the bear is the... the bottom jaw of the bear reaching up.
This bear doesn't know he's European. He doesn't know what he was.
He doesn't even know that he's a bear.
I mean, it's a totally heartbreaking act.
In Central Park Zoo,
Winogrand made one of his most famous and unsettling images.
A lot of people, when they first look at that picture,
they don't realise until like the second or third beat
that the guy hasn't got a baby or something, he's got a chimpanzee in his arms.
They see the interracial couple and they think, "My God, the two of 'em had a monkey."
It's such an outrageous kind of a gag, which is like a bad racist joke.
And that's exactly what Winogrand was aiming at
and why he glommed onto moments like that.
He liked to make pictures
which he knew would make both the most liberal and educated
and the most politically conservative people...
make 'em both kind of upset.
That discomfort, I think, is part of the energy that feeds the photographs.
He did like to kind of startle people out of what they thought was true.
Among Winogrand's acolytes was the British photographer Tony Ray-Jones.
Ray-Jones had moved to New York to train as a graphic designer.
But like his friend Joel Meyerowitz,
he'd been lured away from the drawing board by the siren call of the streets.
Jones' notebooks from the period
contain the distilled wisdom of the 1960s street photographer.
"Be more aggressive. Get more involved. Talk to people.
"Stay with the subject. Be patient.
"Take simpler pictures. Don't take boring pictures.
"Get in closer."
In 1965, Ray-Jones returned home
to see how lessons learned in America could be applied here.
But in the '60s,
Britain was still what was once called "a right little, tight little island".
For the unguarded subjects and spontaneous situations he needed,
there was only one place for Tony Ray-Jones to go, the beach,
the place that British photographers have instead of the street.
The tradition of candid British seaside photography goes way back.
In 1896, Paul Martin was in Great Yarmouth
with a camera disguised as a brown paper parcel.
The pictures he took show the magic of the beach at work.
Here, at least, it was possible to forget for a while what being Victorian meant.
Seventy years later, Ray-Jones turned the beach into a psychiatrist's couch,
the place where the nation reclined and bared its soul.
Family dramas, displays of eccentricity,
dreams of love, the damp disappointments of everyday life.
The beach and the seafront were the stage on which these classic themes were played out,
and Ray-Jones, with his New York-trained eye, caught them all.
Going to the seaside was a journey back in time, in a sense,
to a country which was still struggling to become modern,
and that's what he wanted to find.
Here was a... a place where you could record eccentricity,
and you could... you could record some sort of essence of what people were about.
There's a sort of abandon about the seaside,
you know, you find people who are performing in a way that they wouldn't do,
and then in that performance they're revealing something of themselves
that they wouldn't normally do.
Inspired by Frank and led by Winogrand,
Ray-Jones and the other Fifth Avenue photographers
engaged directly with life on the street
by turning the camera into an extension of their own personalities.
In these pictures, the photographer is always a sensed presence,
a wry observer guiding the camera,
making it see what he sees of the human condition
and the human comedy.
But left to its own devices, the camera can be nothing more
than a slack-jawed, dumb recorder of whatever is put in front of it.
Which is precisely what Ed Ruscha allowed it to be,
in a series of seminal books he produced in the 1960s,
milestones in the history of photography and pop art.
When I grew up, I just knew that photographers were either nerds or they were pornographers.
And so they...
There... there was no redeeming social value
to somebody who has a camera and takes pictures.
But then as I started seriously working as an artist, travelling was essential,
so I was continuously driving back and forth on US 66 between here and Oklahoma,
when I would take all these gasoline stations.
Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations
offered an alternative to the humanistic concerns of the street photographers.
They were about things rather than people, surface rather than soul.
Not the human drama of the street,
but the taken-for-granted backdrop against which the drama plays out.
(Ruscha) I was after that kind of blank reality that... that the subject matter would present.
I was met with a little bit of scepticism from some people,
and usually those people were like, uh... more intellectual
and a lot of those people...
would have this impression from this little product
that I was putting them on.
But it seemed like somebody who worked in a gasoline station
would say, "Hey, this is great, this is great."
Ruscha would go on to apply the same deadpan technique
to parking lots seen from the air
and all the buildings on Sunset Strip.
I photographed this, uh...
two and a half miles of this area of Sunset Boulevard called The Strip.
And, uh... this was done with an automatic camera mounted in a pick-up truck.
And what I was after
is some kind of very democratic view of what this entire thing looks like,
not highlighting anything that is particularly sociologically interesting
or anything.
I would give as much attention to a concrete kerb as I would a building.
(Man) How long did it take to photograph all the buildings?
Oh, this took about the better part of a day to do this.
- You did it in a day? - Mm-hm, yeah.
Oh, I've photographed all of Sunset Boulevard, in a... one day's time.
That's 27 miles.
This is only two and a half miles.
(Electric guitar playing to audience)
But the deadpan ironies of pop art
were not the only new ideas in play in the 1970s.
The biggest change of all came
when some photographers began to see the world in a weird new way, in colour.
- (Man) Judas! - (Slow clapping)
At the time, colour photography was as shocking as Dylan going electric.
It's hard to really place yourself back in that time, but it... it was heretical.
It just... You didn't do it.
I... I remember walking into a gallerist in New York City, with my work, in 1974,
and he took a look and he asked me, "Why are you working in colour?
"Black-and-white is so natural."
Colour photography had been around since the 1860s,
but had flourished in the parts of photography's empire
where commerce trumped art.
Colour was found in advertising, fashion and glossy magazines,
the places where photography sinned.
Worst of all, colour was the natural language of the amateur snapshot.
By the 1970s, only serious art photographers saw the world in black-and-white.
I had met someone at a party in New York,
and we got to talking, and he asked what I did
and I said I was a photographer, and he said, "Oh, can I see your pictures?"
And I opened a box,
and as soon as I opened the box he said, "Oh, they're in black-and-white."
And he really wasn't exposed to art photography.
And that impressed me, that he was expecting,
when I opened the box, he was expecting to see a colour photograph.
It shocked him that it was black-and-white,
and I thought, "Well, what is this? What's this convention about?"
I mean, it just... Serious photography was in black-and-white.
- Martin, you started in black-and-white. - Yeah, like everybody, really.
- In the '70s it's what you did, or before. - Yeah.
'60s, '70s, also was punishingly expensive-seeming.
You had to have labs involved and you couldn't make your own decent prints.
It was sort of taken out of your hands when you did colour.
For those able to shake off the convention,
working in colour proved revelatory.
(Meyerowitz) Photography's about description.
And so if the camera describes things,
then don't you want an instrument that describes more things?
And there's a certain moment I thought,
"Colour will describe more than black-and-white."
When I switched to colour completely, I had to work at slower speeds.
Let's say one hundred and twenty-fifth of a second
or two hundred and fiftieth of a second.
In order to get the depth of field, I had to step back.
When I stepped back, the content changed.
It was no longer about something in the centre doing it. It was about everything.
So it's about the tiger in the window, "Yarrhh!"
About the businessman entering the light.
About the blind man and his dog wearing little leather booties.
About this little cascade of women coming across the street
with the tinkle of their beautiful legs in sunlight.
It was about the incredible depth of space.
I was trying to bring it all together in a two-dimensional field.
And I kept saying to myself at the time, these are field photographs.
They are overall.
I'm not making an incident-related thing,
I'm trying to work without a hierarchy
of the catch in the middle and then something else later on.
Colour didn't just demand aesthetic adjustments.
Kit also had to be reassessed.
This is... this is an eight by ten inch... this is an eight-by-ten-inch camera.
In place of the discreet portable 35mm cameras,
photographers turned to large-format view cameras
big enough to capture the fine detail they now craved.
So here's an eight-by-ten-inch camera. It folds open.
You do this.
And this thing...
folds open,
and locks,
and then up comes the front,
and you put a lens in there.
It is the original voice of the medium.
This is the way photography was born,
which was a box with a lens on the front
and light came in and went onto a piece of film
and this is the size of the film.
So if you're talking about description,
this piece of film, compared to 35mm...
Here, this is a 35mm piece of film.
This is a piece of eight-by-ten-inch film.
So if you want authenticity,
and description and power, spatial power...
this.
Street photographers who had spent the '60s shooting from the hip
found themselves trying to keep up with the '70s using 19th-century cameras.
But it was another piece of kit
which had been gathering dust in photographers' cupboards for decades
that really changed things.
(Stephen Shore) It also has to do with the tripod.
That it... because it's stationary, that the camera's not an extension of me,
it's this tool that I'm fiddling with to make a picture.
And it stays where I made the last decision
if that... that sounds obvious and silly,
but I could hold a camera like this and... and kind of sway,
and the framing keeps changing.
Here, this is where it is, and then I can think about it,
and if I want to move it over, I pick it up and move it over a little, and it stays there.
I can go back and look at it and think about that decision.
If I want to crank it up, I can crank it up.
- (Man) It remembers your last thought. - Yes, it remembers my last thought.
Not everything changed.
Photographers still made journeys out into the world
to see what the world looked like photographed.
Travelling conceptually, shooting in colour,
and often struggling with tripods and heavy view cameras,
they sought out the extraordinary in the ordinary.
What I wanted to do was to keep a visual diary of the trip
and started photographing every person I met,
the beds I slept in, the toilets I used,
art on walls, every meal I ate,
store windows, residential buildings, commercial buildings, main streets,
and then anything else that came my way.
And then that became the framework for... for that series.
(Man on radio) ...amen if you got it all fixed up by Jesus...
(Stephen Shore) I drove in rental cars
and I don't think they had tape decks at that point
so it was just top-40 radio or wherever the local radio station was,
religious stations and country-and-western stations,
and sometimes to entertain myself I would recite Shakespeare.
And after a couple of days, I entered a... a very different kind of psychological state.
I think it has to do with simply keeping my attention focused for hours at a time,
and watching this road passing.
I'm focusing straight ahead,
and this world keeps passing by.
And after a couple of days of this,
I would be very energised and very clear and very focused,
and that would go on for weeks.
I can tell you what it was like.
You know, there I was in this used Volkswagen camper.
It seems like my tyres were always bald,
I always had 40 dollars and a bag full of sunflower seeds
and a few boxes of film
and it was the most exciting time of my life.
Every day from before dawn till after sunset, I was just fascinated.
You know, I was only making two negatives a day. That's all I could afford.
And you would think that your days would be empty,
you know, if you're only pressing the shutter twice.
But every second was filled.
(Chatter)
Not everyone in the 1970s was braving the open road.
0ne of the most influential photographers of the period
was having his adventures closer to home.
- You got a fair number of folks. - Yeah.
So that must be his actual, um... grave.
For most of us, Memphis means Elvis Presley.
But for photographers, the King means William Eggleston.
(Parr) We think of Bill Eggleston, don't we? (Gossage) Yeah, we... we think of Bill.
(Parr) Do you think one day Bill's house will be open to the public?
(Gossage) It isn't even open to friends now. You have to figure out when he's awake.
Eggleston's reputation
rests on the colour photographs he took from the early '70s onwards
of his home city Memphis and the surrounding area.
The pictures caused a stir when they were first shown
at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1976
and published subsequently in a book called William Eggleston's Guide.
Inconsequential, indiscriminate and boring to some.
To others, the guide is suffused with a strange, baffling beauty.
Eggleston's pictures contain all the acute observation
of a master street photographer like Winogrand,
but their brightly coloured surfaces
make them as unreadable as one of Ed Ruscha's gas stations.
Eggleston, a man of few words, has called his pictures "democratic",
adding that he is "at war with the obvious".
(Gossage) He took colour at face value.
Bill said, "If I just make the colour hierarchy the structure of the picture,
"can that work, and still do realistic subject matter, still do the real world?"
(Parr) Was he literally saying that to himself?
Yeah, I mean, he extrapolated the whole idea,
"Well, if pictures need to be structured, how does one structure a colour picture?"
Because colour is more dominant.
That one little red stoplight up there
trumps this whole large volume area of green.
There's one of a shower stall that would be absolutely nothing...
It's sort of this bilious green and a dreadful pink
and it's shot in flash,
and it... it feels, because of the colour,
like it's... like it's a shower in Auschwitz or something.
I mean, and it's some Holiday Inn somewhere.
It's just to have the colour being able to twist the whole content.
- Psychological colour. - Yeah.
Eggleston's take is so particular, it's also eminently portable.
Wherever he goes, his world travels with him.
In 0ctober 2005, he was persuaded to visit the port of Dunkirk in northern France.
In a landscape of windblown dunes, steelworks and container ships,
far removed from the American South,
Eggleston sought out photographic treasure.
- Good morning. - So, my name is Claire.
- C-L-A-R... - I-R-E.
- Thank you very much. - You're welcome.
When Eggleston returned to Dunkirk,
to open an exhibition devoted to his work,
it was a chance for critics and journalists
to see if they could turn the pure gold of his pictures
into the hard currency of words and explanations.
No.
I have always worked quite alone.
They didn't get very far.
I've never really thought about that.
Food does exist,
sort of like cars exist.
(Man) Do you have any particular relation to Edward Hopper's...
- Edward Hopper? - Yeah.
No.
(Juergen Teller) It's quite difficult to talk about William Eggleston's work.
And he can't tell you the answer either.
And... and actually not a lot of people are probably gonna make sense talking about it.
I don't know quite what you mean by that.
Who am I to say?
Hard to answer.
Granted that's one of the stupidest questions I've ever been asked.
(Teller) I like that picture. I don't know why.
That picture is a very intriguing one,
because that looks like in America in some diner,
but also maybe I like it because it's done here but it looks so not from here.
And it does look like a painting.
It looks totally abstract
and it looks like something...
When I'm in a café I see something different in a café...
- Mm. ...I can't see that.
That's why I like it.
(Chuckles)
I'll tell you,
I've replied before to a similar question.
And...
the reply I have given in the past
I still will stick with.
I'm about photographing life today.
Photographers continue to go out into the world
in order to photograph life today.
But their motives and their methods vary.
Colour or black-and-white.
Lightweight 35mm versus heavyweight view camera.
Film versus digital.
But what they have in common is a watchful attentiveness to the world and its ways.
They see the things we miss or don't think about
and then report back so that we have a chance to think again.
It seems to me photographers are angels not gods.
Their job is not to create from nothing but to better understand what is created
and to better see the world
so that the world is coherent, has meaning,
has consequence, has significance.
But photography has to build this out of the facts that we all know
by walking dirty streets and living in dirty air,
and you're not permitted, like philosophers or theologians, to fly off into the abstract.
And... and I think that's what...
frankly, I think that's what has made photography
into something of more than usual importance right now.
(Gossage) These places mean something,
and part of the job is just trying to find out what the hell that is.