On the occasion of its 35th anniversary, the ASMP Bulletin posed a question to some of its members: How has photography changed since ASMP began? They were also asked to specify any photos that were so influential that they actually changed the lives, tastes and perceptions of those who viewed them. We reproduce here some of those responses — fascinating from our vantage point of almost a quarter century later, but also for the photos they singled out, many of them as vivid and noteworthy today as they were then.
Photography: The Past 35 Years
It changed a nation. but how has it changed itself? Has the image become more important than the message?
Cornell Capa, Photographer
Attitudes have changed. When I joined Life’s staff during the postwar years, photographers had no control over their own work. But we had a fresh attitude and wanted to go further than just editing our work and handing it in.
Gene Smith (bio) (photos) was one of the first to force the issue. He wanted time to make the right kind of prints for his story about Albert Schweitzer, he wanted input on layout and he wanted more space. Later, David Douglas Duncan (bio, photos) attempted to get his own editorial points across in his Indochina story. He felt he knew more about that war and about French colonial attitudes than Henry Luce (bio).
Cartier-Bresson (bio) (photos), in the postwar years, had to be asked before he’d allow his pictures to be cropped. “Don’t tamper with my compositions,” he said. He was quite alone in that, and it was a fantastic exercise of the artist’s rights.
In 1952, I had the nerve to ask what happened to my stories when they didn’t run. They were dead without being born. We asked for the right to get hold of this work, and it was given to us. Life also began to acknowledge the individuality of photographers and give it proper recognition.
The point I’m making is that in 1947 it was a jungle. Remember, the art of photography did not exist. No one hung photographs. How many pages and what day rate you got, those were the measures. But, after ‘72 with the death of Life and Look, photographers were totally liberated from that attitude. The minute the walls of galleries and museums became important places, the composition, the image, the object became important. The real basic change has been from photography as communication to the photograph as object, and this evolution only became possible when we were freed from the printed page.
The big ones were the personal essays that began with Wilson Hicks and Gene Smith. They made Americans realize how ordinary lives could have poetry and pathos, could be heroic. It seemed we were all interesting people. These essays revealed as much about the photographer as the subject.
George Lois, Designer/Advertising Executive
(bio)
The young guys coming out of the Army after World War II — Bert Stern (photos), Carl Fischer, Irving Penn (bio) (photos) — set standards in commercial photography during the 1940s and early 1950s that still exist. There are a tremendous number of terrific photographers today, but not many have thediscipline of the post-war photographers. I like to work with the more disciplined guys who came out of the war. Many of them were trained as designers, men like Henry Wolf, Otto Storch, Onofrio Paccione and Carl Fischer. I can explain an idea to one of these guys and they are excited, not by the picture so much as the ad, the selling idea. I’m not saying younger photographers lack talent. You can get tremendous pictures from them. But many seem to have disdain for the product. They don’t understand there’s a kind of beauty in a specific selling idea.
The most important stuff was done during the creative revolution on Madison Avenue in the 1950s and 1960s. Bert Stern’s shots for Smirnoff Vodka were the kind of advertising people looked at and talked about. They were spectacular.
Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., Managing Editor, Life
Since World War II, equipment has become lighter, easier to use. film has become faster. The problems of bulky equipment and inadequate light no longer exist.
People have been able to use these small cameras with their heads and with their hearts. i think Cartier-Bresson typified how photography really changed. All the pictures taken by that little man with his almost invisible camera, those incisive moments had never really been captured before. They are true candids, but filled with tremendous power, able to evoke both thought and feeling. I think, today, young men like Michael O’Brien (bio, photos) and Brian Lanker (bio, photos) seem to have captured, in their own special ways, that same rare combination of form and feeling.
There’s so much less for photographers to learn technically now. But I think those long years of apprenticeship, when they had to learn how to print and light objects, were very valuable. Maybe it’s too easy to make pictures today.
During the first half of the war in Vietnam, we saw traditional war pictures: brave Americans, great firepower, the age of helicopter warfare. Then, we started to be assaulted by pictures like the crying mother during the Tet offensive, My Lai bodies. These pictures really changed our perceptions of that war. They made our hearts go out to the people we were actually killing to save.
Pictures of Bull Connor [during the civil rights movement], Martin Luther King and police with dogs and with hoses — these had tremendous impact. Back during the ‘72 campaign, there was Muskie crying in the snow and later, there was the influence of the Watergate coverage.
Arthur Rothstein, Director of Photography, Parade
What has changed has been the growing acceptance of the reality of the camera. The public believes the camera presents things as they are. They have faith in the truthfulness of the photographic image.
Photography has become a more and more important form of communication as the years have progressed, until it is now one of the most important means of learning about the world in which we live. And the photographer has acquired a great deal more importance and stature. Back in 1945, nobody believed a photograph would ever be sold at auction for $20,000, but that has happened, and photographs are now considered works of art.
Another important change has been the emergence of photography as the folk art of the 20th century. There is no more important statistic than the number of photographs made in the United States last year — 10 billion. But what has happened is that for the public, the layman, pictures are beginning to take the place of reality.
There’s a story I like to tell about the woman who is pushing a baby carriage down the street. A friend comes along, looks at the baby and says, “My, what a beautiful baby.” “That’s nothing,” says the mother. “You should see his picture.”
How many times are weddings stopped so the photographers can reload? Every event is photographed today, and the photographs have become more important than the event.
Today, the camera is an extension of the photographer’s eyes. The making of a photograph is effortless, and even professional cameras are foolproof. You can’t miss. Anybody can be a photographer, as far as the mechanics of photography are concerned. One defect of this situation is that, in many cases, the camera runs away with the photographer. You can’t make a creative statement unless you can control the instrument, and controlling the electronic device — with its motor drives, its LEDs and all those other things that make photography easy — is one of the most difficult tasks a photographer faces.
“Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange (bio) (photos) comes quickly to mind, as does my own “Dust Storm” photo. What these pictures showed was cause and effect during the Depression. Eddie Adams’s (bio) famous photo of General Loan shooting a Vietnamese soldier in Saigon was the primary photo that turned the American people against the war. That said it all. Nick Ut’s (bio) fantastic shot of a little girl running naked down a Vietnamese street also contributed to a growing American feeling against the war.
Pulitzer Prize winner Stanley Forman gave us a sensational photo of a confrontation in Boston, when a white man tried to ram a black man with an American flag. For sheer shock, there is Bob Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald. This stirred America, brought home the terror of assassination and showed the worst traits of American life — violence and lawlessness.
Also, don’t forget Buzz Aldrin’s shot of man walking on the moon. That was a first.
Sean Callahan, Editor, American Photographer
What’s happened in the last 15 years is more important than anything that happened before.
There was the decline in the graphics market after a lot of upwardly mobile people started investing at the $100 to $500 level. Gradually, they got burned as the market became inflated and a lot of bad work was produced. People stopped coming to galleries. Gallery owners got worried, but then they realized there were 150 years of photography waiting to be discovered. Photographs came in at the right price, and galleries were able to woo back these buyers.
Also, there were technological advances in cameras and film that took away a lot of the photographer’s alchemic function. Photography became accessible to more people. And there was a movie, Antonioni’s Blow Up. It made photography and the photographer’s life style very attractive. Photography became sexy. it went from being a hobby to being a life style.
Haeberle’s My Lai massacre photos showed the real atrocities in the Vietnam War, atrocities by Americans. These had more of an impact than even the Eddie Adams photograph of General Loan.
The execution of Oswald by Jack Ruby was the photograph that put the final exclamation point on that entire news photo. So too was [Joe] Rosenthal’s shot of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. From the civil rights movement, we should recall Charlie Moore’s shot of hoses pinning black kids against a wall in Alabama.
The Stern campaign for vodka was ingenious. This was a product made solely for advertising. It was so graphic, not the least bit complex, and Stern set the tone for advertising photos to follow.
Of course, [Edward] Steichen (bio) (photos) understood the marketplace and its needs. He had good taste, style, was humanistic. His fashion photography moved from the more superficial to the more democratic, the more social.
[Richard] Avedon (bio/photos) and [Diane]Arbus (bio) (photos) followed this up with head-on flash shots that made you feel the photos were “stolen.” Mili and Rose had an effect on the public’s perception of photography. The public became more aware, more suspicious. People began to wonder what photography would do next. After all, [Gjon] Mili and [Ben] Rose had sliced time into precise increments.
Louis Dorfman, Designer
The quality of today’s work is apparent in the terrific tabletop photography we have, and much of that quality appears in commercial photography.
The technology has changed. Also, because so many of the good guys were art directors — photographers like Norman Greiner, Steve Horn, Irving Penn, Howard Zieff, Onofrio Paccione and Phil Marco — they come to the subject with interesting perceptions.
Then, there’s the multitudes out there with cameras today. The technology is superb, and all kinds of idiots are running around with these little machines that do magnificent things. Because of the volume alone, a lot of decent stuff is being done and interesting points of view are being explored. If 10,000 guys are snapping, there’s got to be one-and-a-half decent pictures coming out of it.
You’ve got to remember how smashing Irving Penn’s Jell-O campaign was. Compared to what else was on advertising pages in the 1950s, Penn’s pictures are absolutely beautiful.
Cecil Beaton’s (bio/photos) work comes to mind, and Avedon’s. They made taste. Ben Rose made an amazing contribution. He brought high technology and electronics to photography and made them serve a very practical purpose.
Burt Glinn, President, ASMP
I no longer burn my hands changing flashbulbs. Cameras are better, smaller, faster, more sophisticated and, at the same time, simpler to operate. With modern electronics, even my Aunt Fanny — who gave me my first camera, a Kodak Monitor — can take adequate pictures. I just wish she’d learn that her Instamatic flash is useless from the top deck of Yankee Stadium.
Although it is much easier now to take a photograph, it is just as difficult, and rare as it ever was, to take a good photograph. Finding clients and a public able to tell the difference remains, as always, the photographer’s chief problem.
The most significant change in photography, however, has been the declining number of magazines that use photography seriously. While newspaper photography has become immeasurably better since the ASMP started, magazine photography has, at best, stood still. This has not been for lack of great photographers or great pictures, but for lack of adequate display.
When we talk of photography changing American minds, we first think of news pictures with subjects so dramatic or painful that they had an immediate impact on the public psyche. George Strock’s “Dead Americans on Buna Beach,” David Duncan’s pictures of retreat in Korea, photographs of the self-immolated Buddhist priest in Vietnam, the horror of My Lai, the records of civil wrongs in the ’60s. The list could go on.
Some of these were great photographs and some were records of great, shocking or painful events. But photographers also influence the American mind more subtly and perhaps more deeply and permanently by dealing sensitively with the stuff of everyday life. Great photographers, by looking through their lenses with fresh eyes every day, have helped us all learn to see better and deeper and, hopefully, to see more humanely. That we have succeeded even partially in this is no small achievement for the past 35 years.
Neil Fujita, Designer
New equipment has allowed photographers much more mobility. They could get closer. An image of a woman was no longer a face and a body. You could catch an essence of her in the crinkle of a knee.
Art directors and designers can now tell photographers, “Listen, you couldn’t do this last year, but there’s a camera now and there’s a film now that lets you get that shot. I want it.” Designers can ask for colors they want now, too.
You can do a lot with technology, and there’s some razzle-dazzle photographs. Some photographers lean on new techniques. But a person still needs a creative sense and good taste. If he doesn’t have them, he won’t be able to produce, no matter how much the tools have improved.
Irving Penn came out with pictures that were simple, clean, symbolic. Then, Bert Stern brought a little bit of theater onto the scene, taking a glass of vodka on the desert. A little bit of flamboyance there, which was terrific. After Stern, there was Art Kane (bio/photos), doing things in the same spirit, and Howard Zieff, doing people shots. There were others at that time, and a lot of them had been art directors who suddenly saw how they could communicate a headline with a photograph.
John Durniak, Picture Editor, The New York Times
The major change is the ground gained in the art world, when an Avedon print sells for up to $10,000 or an entire gallery is built around Gene Smith’s pictures.
Right up next to that is science becoming the super photographer. Getting a camera out to Saturn and recording on computer what no man has ever seen, that’s an incredible feat, and it’s pure and simple photography with a long remote.
I think the changes that Avedon has made in our perceptions rank as number three. He’s been a real force for change, awakened us to new ways of thinking.
Doyle, Dane, Bernbach started it all. Wingate Payne was the man responsible for those fantastic Volkswagen ads that started changes in Detroit. They were well ahead of what everyone else was doing, and heralded the whole energy them.
Don’t forget Irving Penn’s Jell-O ad; that was a work of art. But Stern turned everything around with his Smirnoff campaign. That was a shining light in print advertising; it was optical poetry. Eventually, everybody tried to imitate Stern.