(“Why are portholes circular?” Campany writes, in one of his factoidal asides. Church, the shape of the photo echoing the portholes on the boat. 1942, the strip of circles in Étienne-Jules Marey’s Vertical Ball Drop from 1890, and a circular photograph of George Eastman aboard the SS Gallia by Frederick S. It steps away from the linear history of photography and attunes the eye to hidden affinities across time and place, visual echoes and patterns-like the three balls in Baldessari’s photographs rhyming with the five bubbles in Helen Levitt’s New York, c. This kind of whiplash is one of the book’s key pleasures. The text on Muybridge stays close to his biography-we learn about his seminal role in the history of photography and cinema, as well as the fact that he shot the man with whom his wife conceived a child, and decamped after the trial to South America-whereas the text on the Gilbreths blends a folksy meditation on the machine age with a gloss on the Gilbreths’ methods (light bulbs attached to the body) and their promotional attempts to catch the wave of Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management.” A few pages later, there’s a blue sky and palm trees in John Baldessari’s Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts), 1973 a few pages after that: a bold portrait of a young woman in London’s East End, in 1955, wearing tattered high-Edwardian dress, surrounded by the rubble of war. On the next page, there is a 1914 “cyclegraph” by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, showing the motions of a woman’s hands at work, as traced by beams of light. When he turns to well-trodden, canonical material-Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, for instance-Campany doesn’t offer up the familiar image of the horse galloping, or the man leaping, but instead a weird, late example: Chickens Scared by a Torpedo (1884–87). Some of the photographers discussed are famous, but others are barely known or completely anonymous. There are photographs from the mid-nineteenth century as well as the twenty-first, from Paris and Mexico City as well as Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Port-au-Prince, Glasgow, and Tokyo. It’s a kind of madcap survey that makes no claims to being comprehensive but, incidentally, covers a lot of ground. He includes more than one hundred images, arranged nonchronologically, non-geographically, and non-thematically, each accompanied by a short text that blends description, theory, history, and biography. Toshio Shibata, Nikko City, Tochigi Prefecture, 2013 Courtesy Toshio Shibata/Gallery LuisottiĬampany’s book is a delightful jumble of particulars, and a corrective, in many ways, to theories of photography that concern themselves very little with actual photographs. Upon reading this, one might pause for a second: Are we about to sit through two hundred pages of free-associative prose-poetry that dances around photographs without saying much about them? Fortunately, no. Following Talbot, Campany lays out the method for his own word-and-image book: “The images do not illustrate a written argument, and the writing is not a script for looking, but together they may bring you closer to the madness.” As Campany points out, Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, published in six parts between 18, was not only the first commercially sold book to include photographs it also included texts, some of which described the images and the processes used to produce them, and others that were more tangent. In each one there is a kind of madness.” He repeats the word “madness” (a few too many times) to suggest how unruly photographs are, how they resist being fixed with meaning, even though people have tried to steer them and constrain them with words since the early history of the medium. It begins with some vague throat clearing: Photographs, he writes in the introduction, “confuse as much as fascinate, conceal as much as reveal, distract as much as compel. David Campany, On Photographs, Cambridge and London, MIT Press, 2020 272 pages, 125 color illustrations, $35 hardcover.ĭavid Campany’s On Photographs is guilty of these minor crimes, yet it shows one possible way of working the trap.
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