No matter how much television we watch, photographs have the edge when it comes to defining a moment or revealing inner depths. You have only to look at newspapers for evidence, writes Joe Breen
Some Native American tribes apparently feared that the soul could be imprisoned in a photograph. Whatever about the soul, the best photography can capture, often definitively, moments in time. Despite the advances in moving images, such as those brought by film and video, we continue to turn to the still image to define a moment or to reveal some depth of personality.
This is what makes news photography such a key part of our lives. Mark how often a single image sums up the horror or the happiness of an event. Witness the photograph The Irish Times put on its front page last autumn of a man carrying a bloodied child after the Russian school siege ended in mayhem. The image bursts out of the page. The man's eyes are wild with terror as he seeks to escape with his limp, heartbreakingly pathetic bundle.
Technically, it is imperfect: a slight shudder causes the image to appear "soft". But this only adds to the drama of the moment. Is the child alive? Is the man the father? Did they get away? How could anyone do this to a child? What of the other children? The horror of the event is crystalised in this moment. In this example the image helps shape our view of the event and of the people involved, the innocent and the guilty. It stares back at us, demanding us to make a judgment, to react.
Today we understand the value of great news photography and celebrate it with generous bylines and numerous awards. It wasn't always so. Picture Machine: The Rise Of American Newspictures is a remarkable compilation of images from the past century, taken from the archives of International News Photos and United Press International, two key agencies. The bulk of the photographs are attributed to Unknown. These pioneers of the form not only had to battle against the limitations of heavy, rudimentary equipment and the dominance of the printed word to make their presence felt; they also generally worked in anonymity.
The book, in large-format high-quality paper, is introduced by the joint editors, William Hannigan and Ken Johnston, both senior executives at the archive's current owner, the Corbis agency. They provide the technical and industrial backdrop to the rise of US news photography. While technical advances made the camera more portable, it was the development ... continued overleaf
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of the wire photo machine in the early 1930s that brought pictures onto the pages of newspapers throughout the US and, later, the world. In every newspaper the wire room was a key facility, the hub of breaking news and the source for the images portraying it. This remained the case until the development of new production systems in the late 1980s.
The photographs date from 1915 through to the final image of Dr Martin Luther King in 1965. In that span of time we are served a rolling picture of the American century. The images are essentially unpretentious. Any shades of Man Ray or his artistic ilk would have been laughed out of the newsroom. These were hard-bitten journalists charged with getting a picture that told a story. So where there is flair - and there are many luminous examples - it is almost inadvertent. Underlining this fact, the editors have cleverly included the original captions. These give a strong sense of the prevailing attitudes to the subjects.
No one theme runs through the 260-plus images. Generally, they comprise the bread and butter of news photography: crime, sport, show business, the privileged and the poor, the great and the good, war, tragedy, civil rights, union strikes and all else in between. There is humour, there is pathos, there is grief. There are people and events we all know, and there are some now lost in the mists of time.
But what makes all these black-and-white images so vital is that they are mirrors on a forgotten age. So what is quite a bland image of Ku Klux Klansmen marching behind the Stars and Stripes through a town in 1924 is given added weight by the realisation that they are parading through the Long Branch, New Jersey, not Mississippi or Alabama. Context, as ever, is key.
And the photographers were not averse to providing their own. On page 103 there is a fine, typically morose portrait of Buster Keaton, taken in 1934. The caption reads: "If Buster Keaton was glad to be back in the United States, he certainly kept it a secret. The cameraman asked the film comedian to smile and this is the result. He was aboard the Ile De France on his return from a five-month tour of the continent."
These images are not definitive, nor are they meant to be. But they are a compelling window on a world long gone. It might be stretching it a tad to say they carry the soul of their subjects, but looking at an African-American brother and sister holding the Stars and Stripes in August 1915, you wonder how his confident smile and her more apprehensive stare served them down the years.
Picture Machine: The Rise Of American Newspictures, edited by William Hannigan and Ken Johnston, is published by Harry N. Abrams Inc, €37.50