Two Billion Clicks

(See Cover)

The great Sphinx lay in fleeting twilight. In the background loomed the Pyramid of Cheops, majestic monument to human striving for eternity. Over the entire scene hovered the breath of the silent desert, the hush of ages. Then a voice spoke.

"For God's sakes, Betsy, stop wiggling," said the voice. "Hold on a minute while I take another light reading . . . Now, smile."

Click.

"Fine. Now just one more, and this time smile as if you mean it."

Before the natural wonders of the world and facing its innumerable small mysteries, before Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore and the Eiffel Tower, in Siamese temples, French cathedrals and New England general stores, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and at the top of the Empire State Building, the U.S. amateur photographer pursues his hobby. His camera's combined clicks (he is taking nearly 2 billion pictures this year) would drown the loudest thunder, and the combined light from his flashbulbs (he is using 500 million) would make a major planet pale. The sun to him is chiefly a source of light that often calls for a yellow filter, and the moon merely an object which it is hard to photograph without a tripod: he approaches the highest peaks through a telephoto lens, scans new horizons through his range finder--and if he ever came across the Blue Bird, he would whip out his color chart.

He spent $300 million this year on cameras and gadgets, in order to snap Haitian market women, Manhattan shoeshine boys, Indian fakirs, and (above all) Junior, aged three. Innumerable times he went through the sweet agony of fetching his prints from the corner drugstore or the mailbox,* and if his work did not come out well, he blamed the unknown vandals in the darkroom, the makers of the camera, the film, the subject, and sometimes even himself. He spoiled about 10% of his film, enough to make individual shots of the entire population of the North American continent, and took enough bad pictures to give ulcers to every museum director in the U.S.

Nevertheless, he was practicing an important art, the most typical art of the 20th century, and perhaps the only national folk art yet produced by the U.S.

Fever of Reality. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 1859, called the camera "the mirror with a memory." Americans, more than any other people, have become used to seeing the world and themselves in that mirror--staring closely at birth and death, the torment of war and the pleasures of peace, the acts of history and nature, the faces of leaders and of nameless masses. Americans are wrapped in photographs ; in newspapers, magazines, movies, billboards, the camera shows them the microbe as big as a face, a face as big as a city block, an entire city as plainly as their own street, their own street as fresh and exciting as a foreign shore. They are caught up (as one photographer put it) in a "fever of reality." Just when and how this fever produces true art has been debated almost since the first daguerreotype appeared more than a century ago.

The difference between The Last Supper and the greatest of modern photographs is that Da Vinci's painting is a product of the imagination. The picture came from inside Da Vinci, just as Hamlet came from inside Shakespeare. Photographs come from the outside; the camera artist sees something memorable in the world about him, and seizes it from the stream of time into a flat and shadowy sort of permanence. His picture is not so much created as caught. Photography can and often does produce great things without the intercession of genius (many of the finest World War II pictures were made without human guidance, by automatically triggered cameras).

Defenders of photography as a true art form retort that no work of art is possible without, to some extent, copying outside models, or without the intervention of some accident--the chance ray of light on a sitter, the stray bit of dialogue overheard in the street. The photographer uses his artistic imagination by choosing his subject, by lighting and posing it, by emphasizing some details and cutting out others. But photographers are forever haunted by the technical ease with which they can reproduce reality. Almost since photography began, they have been alternating between the "fever of reality" and cold chills which sent them shuddering away from reality.

The Beginning. The trouble is well illustrated by the case of Weegee (real name: Arthur Fellig), an inspired news photographer. When he first went to work for Acme Newspictures in 1923, he never got the plushier assignments, because he refused to wear a necktie. Later, he freelanced for several New York papers, and saw the big city as it had rarely been seen before, with a clear but compassionate eye for its brutalities, follies and tender moments (some of the results were published in a successful photo book called Naked City). He would cruise Manhattan all night. Explains Weegee: "Good pictures are like blintzes. You gotta get them while they're hot . . . It's gotta be real."

Then something happened to Weegee. He began wearing neckties. He went arty. He started experimenting with a strange lens he had developed that put four eyes into the Mona Lisa's face, two heads on the Statue of Liberty, and considerable additions on to Marilyn Monroe's naturally exaggerated figure. His former fans are disappointed in him. Reality is no longer enough. "Got tired of the old line," he says. "Changed my act."

Like Weegee, almost all serious photographers have believed at one time or another that "it's gotta be real"; like Weegee, they have a frequent urge to "change the act."

The first act goes back to 1822 or 1826 (the date is uncertain), when a French aristocrat with an unlikely name, Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, and a Parisian scene-painter named Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre developed the professionally workable "daguerreotype." It was so successful that a French cartoon soon complained that half of mankind had become "daguerreocrazed," while the rest was "daguerreomazed."*Everything in sight was caught on the magic plates--Victor Hugo's hand, the moon, the 30th reunion of the Yale class of 1810, President John Quincy Adams (first U.S. President ever photographed). But already the revolt against realism had begun. A Swedish photographer named Oscar Rejlander invented the composite photograph, and started to turn out allegories. His most startling picture was produced from 30 separate negatives : The Two Paths of Life, showing one youth embarking on a career of virtue, illustrated by chaste and busy maidens on one side of the picture, while another youth started out on a course of licentiousness, dramatized by fetchingly nude ladies and assorted revelers on the other (and considerably larger) side of the work.

"You Push the Button." The U.S. soon led the photography field (one English critic, chagrined when his country lost in an international exhibition, attributed U.S. successes to the American climate). At first, U.S. daguerreotype studios were sedate affairs, always featuring, as one writer described them, "the pianoforte, the music box, the singing of birds; the elegant drapery . . . the struggling sunbeam peering through doors of stained glass . . ." But production was upped from a few pictures to thousands a day, partly because of a group of go-getting photographers nicknamed "blue bosom boys." (As in TV, they could not properly photograph white shirt fronts.) Then photography passed two major milestones: P: U.S. picture journalism began with Mathew Brady, who passionately took up photography at 16. A weak-eyed, blue-spectacled portrait photographer, he decided in 1861 to cover the Civil War ("A spirit in my feet said go, and I went"). His quiet war pictures did not bring the spectator to the midst of battle, as recent war photos have, but they made a deep, clear, unforgettable record.* In 1880 the New York Daily Graphic ran a shot of "Shantytown" (the squatters' nest that later became the fashionable Upper East Side), in halftone reproduction. News photography soon became a profession, and men who learned to seize the exact moment when events show dramatically clear often made great pictures. Muckraking Journalist Jacob A. Riis stirred the U.S. with his stones and photographs of New York slums. Despite its occasional successes, the full potentialities of picture journalism were not grasped until 1936, when LIFE was founded on the proposition that "photography is the most important instrument of journalism which has been developed since the printing press." P: Mass production of cameras and film got under way when a Rochester, N.Y. industrialist named George Eastman invented the Kodak. Eastman coined the name to be pronounceable in any language and "snap like a shutter in your face." He also invented the slogan: "You press the button, We do the rest." By 1896, twelve years before Henry Ford started mass-producing autos, Eastman was manufacturing cameras by the thousands, and film by the hundreds of miles. Price of the first Kodak, $25, with a $10 charge for developing, and reloading. Twelve years later, Eastman produced a "Brownie" for $1. Photography became a major U.S. fad. "Detective cameras" were disguised as ladies' handbags, muffs, briefcases. President Grover Cleveland delightedly used his Kodak all day long on a fishing trip, was dismayed to learn in the evening that he should have wound the film. The Pink Lady, a 1911 musical, had a song:

Bring along the camera,

Fetch along the camera,

Don't have any doubt about it . . .

Can't do anything without it . . .

The Old Wagnerian. In 1882 a young man from Hoboken named Alfred Stieglitz was in Germany studying engineering. In a Berlin shop window he saw a camera, and without hesitation went in and bought it. "Fate," he said later, "took me to that shop." He came to produce the finest body of photos yet made by a single artist. He was an accomplished technician, yet he kept insisting that technique was of minor importance. What mattered to him was art--the creation of "equivalents" for reality.

He also shaped the early work of such major photographers as Edward Steichen, Edward Weston and Walker Evans, who were to follow divergent paths. Steichen went on to become the first famed glamour photographer, with his work in the early 1930s for Vanity Fair, today is Curator of Photography at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. Weston pioneered sharp-focus photography of places and things, and started a naturalistic school, of which the chief disciple is Ansel Adams, regarded as perhaps the finest landscape photographer today.

Evans broke the old man's fanatically artistic spell by taking clear, cold, head-on pictures of ordinary people and things. "After Stieglitz's real work was done," says Realist Evans, "he became a very arty old man and a Wagnerian man if there ever was one--a great old fiddler and lace-maker." Evans' realistic approach has inspired a generation of photographers, among them Margaret Bourke-White, who first made her mark photographing industry, and Dorothea Lange, who photographed California's migratory pea-pickers to show the effects of the Depression. Echoing the early Weegee, Evans says: "Photography is for the record. Realism is all."

Contrived & Documentary. That realism is not necessarily all is illustrated by the retrospective portfolio of photographs (see pp. 59-66). Of the twelve shown, at least half are contrived rather than documentary. Tana Hoban used a professional model for her sun-splashed shot of a little girl. Its lighting is reminiscent of the impressionistic paintings of Renoir et al., and its atmosphere is that of a powder puff. Aaron Siskind's closeup of peeling paint is not supposed to look like paint alone; it is a faintly sinister pattern reminiscent of easel pictures by the German surrealist Max Ernst. Arnold Newman's portrait of Igor Stravinsky is heavily symbolic: its main feature is not Stravinsky, but a piano top photographed to resemble a looming note of music.

Moreover, two standout photographers now strongly for realism made their first fame as "pictorial" artists. Alfred Eisenstaedt--the master of the sharp, meaningful portrait and the photographer who stirred U.S. enthusiasm for the Leica and other 35-mm. cameras--contributed an early picture of a ballet rehearsal that owes its mothlike softness and radiance to Degas' influence. Irving Penn's evocation of a midsummer nap harks back to a 15th century Venetian, Carlo Crivelli, who also used sharply focused flies to achieve a greater illusion of depth.

As in painting, abstract photographic experiments seem destined not to replace realism, but to teach it new tricks. One of the paradoxes of photography is the fact that never does life seem more unreal than when the realistic camera comes closest to it: when Harold Edgerton photographed a drop of milk falling into a saucer, it came out looking like a crown, and when Edward Weston shot the heart of an artichoke, it looked like a modernistic abstraction.

For the Printed Page. Young photographers seem jaded by technical perfection, regard stark effects that were considered shattering a decade or two ago merely as snapshots. Says Edward Steichen: "We hate clarity, and want feeling in what we photograph. We think that there is a deadly monotony in technical procedure . . . Anyone can take pictures, but we need at least 200 years before photography really gets good."

The majority of good professional U.S. photographers work for the printed page. Journalism at its best has found room for both clarity and feeling. It accepts such disparate artists as the lucky amateur who happens to be on the scene of interesting events (e.g., the story in the current LIFE on the student riots at Ames, Iowa was shot almost entirely by amateurs); as well as a professional such as W. Eugene Smith, a chronic agonizer ("I am constantly torn") who traveled 7,500 miles to find the right locale for his Spanish Village (1951), shot 500 negatives from which 17 were used.

The printed page is perhaps where photography is truly at home. It seems too restless for museum walls. Says Old Pro Irving Penn: "The photographer belongs to the age of the subway, high-speed cars and tall buildings. His picture is made to be seen amid the haste of contemporary life. Some real folk art appears in journalism or in advertising. A picture that sells a cake of soap can be art too."

How Good the Amateur? By last count, there are 55,000 professional photographers in the U.S., and 35 million amateurs. Of these, about 28 million are "casual," 5,000,000 are "serious" and 2,000,000 are "expert." The casual amateur is the one who takes a picture of his baby from 20 feet away, forgets to wind his film, and cannot tell a thyratron from a reseau./- He is looked down on by experts, but it is he who provides the vast ground swell of enthusiasm for photography, and he has helped pile up the statistics of photography's tremendous growth:

P: 27 million U.S. families own cameras, as many as have cars, more than have telephones or TV sets (9,300,000 of them have two cameras; 1,500,000 have four or more). In 1941 only 20 million families had cameras.

P: This year amateurs are spending well over $100 million on developing and printing, as against $20 million in 1940. P: The photographic industry will net an estimated $700 million, against $126 million in 1939. The lion's share, an estimated 65%, will go to Eastman, the rest to Ansco, Du Pont, and nearly 200 smaller camera and equipment manufacturers.

The casual amateur does not worry about producing art, although experts are sure that, scattered in the nation's family albums, there are enough undiscovered masterpieces to fill the National Gallery. The more earnest amateur is organized in a network of 9,000 camera clubs across the U.S. He exhibits his work in museums, at international salons, and, between times, to a captive audience of visiting neighbors. Five major camera magazines with a combined monthly circulation of 806,000 are published for him, as well as 60 camera columns syndicated in hundreds of newspapers. He has made the picture book the hit of the decade in the publishing industry.

How good is the stuff he produces?

One distinguished photographer, Robert Capa, once moodily declared: "Most of the people in this country take pictures, and most of them take better ones than I do." Amateur pictures have made history, e.g., the sinking of the Vestris (1928), the explosion of the Hindenburg (1937), the Hotel Winecoff fire (1946).

On the other hand, U.S. picture editors complain that amateurs by & large have nothing to say. Many of them seem so exhausted by achieving technical excellence that they have no imagination left to bring to their subjects. Amateurs, like professionals, have their troubles with reality. Part of the difficulty is that they often cannot see reality through all the gadgets which fill their world.

Baby Legs & Butterflies. The serious U.S. amateur does not yield even to the U.S. driver in his passion for new models and new gimmicks. Foreign cameras with exotic names (Japan's Nikon, Germany's Plaubel Makina and Sweden's Hasselblad) attract him as Jaguars and Lancias attract the motorist ($10 million worth of foreign cameras was imported into the U.S. last year). He is particularly taken with such fairly new products as baby flashbulbs, easily portable strobe lights, and stereoscopic cameras. He pores over catalogues as a gourmet surveys a menu. How can he resist such dishes as the Globetrotter Gadget Bag ("Leather-covered sponge rubber bumper for carrying against body," $42.50) ; Steineck A-B-C Camera ("Straps to the wrist . . . brilliant finder for sighting at waist level," $150); Flexing Powelites ("Portable Sunshine . . . adjust your lights to any desired position,"

$10.95-$14.95).

The camera devotee is apt to lapse into

a language all his own. Sample:

Ashcan school (gloomy photography) baby legs (short-legged tripod) butterfly (shadow beneath a subject's nose) darkroom widow (a hypo hound's wife) Dinky-Inkie (small spotlight) dynamite (strong developing fluid) high hat (low camera support for "worm's eye" pictures) lens louse (he muscles into someone else's picture) soot & whitewash (a print that has no middle tones) willy (a soft, fuzzy picture).

And so the amateur strides on, gadget bag bumping against his body, camera on his wrist, portable sunshine at his elbow, the little darkroom widow waiting at home. He lies on his belly in the snow of the Rockies, prowls the Fulton Fish Market at dawn, gets drenched in an inland lake, and hangs from ladders, chasing--with a hunter's relentless zeal--the fleeting moment, to trap it on the silver-coated strip of paper.

Sometimes close to the professional's work, more often miles away from it, he contributes to an art which rivals American painting in quality and interest. Photography does not have (and perhaps cannot have) the quality of slow revelation found in paintings. Its function is quick impact. Yet it sees many things the human eye does not see, in a wray the human brain alone cannot retain. It is compiling a vast and brilliant album of the odd, the beautiful and terrible human family. Above all, it is an art form which, for the first time since the art of the Middle Ages, is not reserved to an elite of experts but in which any man with a box camera and an eye for life can shine.

* Unless he happened to be one of some 1,000,000 "hypo hounds" who do their own developing.

* Arab scholars knew the basic optical principle underlying photography as early as 1038 A.D. Leonardo da Vinci noted that a small hole drilled in the wall of a dark room (camera obscura) facing a sunlit scene will project an upside-down image on the opposite wall. A Venetian nobleman, Danielle Barbaro, in 1568 fitted a light-concentrating lens into the hole. Later jt was found that a small box would do the trick as well. Frosted glass was used for the back of the box, and the image projected on the glass (art students traced the image on the glass as an aid to drawing). Next came the idea of capturing the image by making the back of the box chemically sensitive to light--the basic form of the daguerreotype camera. Others experimented with paper negatives followed by glass plates and film. * Credited with being the world's first war photographer to work under fire was the Englishman Roger Fenton, who covered the Crimean War (1854-56). He took with him a wagon outfitted as a darkroom, five cameras and 700 plates. * In 1909, at Railroad Tycoon Edward Henry Harriman's funeral, Arden, N.Y.

/-Respectively, an electronic tube,used in flash equipment, and a color screen used in some printing processes.

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