I’d been looking forward to seeing the first of the Guardian/Observer series of nine booklets on “100 years of great press photographs” today, but have to admit I was just a little disappointed.
Not that most of the 35 or so pictures from the 1910s and twenties aren’t in the main interesting pictures, but that in rather too many cases they aren’t really “press photographs”. That is, they were not taken for use in the papers or published in newspapers or magazines in the era in which they were taken.
Or probably not, because with very rare exceptions, nothing is revealed about their publication history. But I suspect that those by some of the best-known names here – such as August Sander, Lartigue, Andre Kertesz as well as others didn’t appear in newsprint until considerably later.
Few of the captions do more that simply tell us a little more about the event or situation but there are some exceptions, particularly in the comments by Paul Lowe on a Lewis Hine picture and by cycling journalist William Fotheringham on what must surely be the best picture of all time of the Tour de France, with two of the “convicts of the road” (and in the picture it’s an extremely stony one) stopping to quench their thirst at a village bar. Like quite a few of the images, the name of the photographer is not known – and as with probably most real press photography of this era – the photographs would have appeared uncredited.
As of course far too many still do today. Even at times in the Guardian, though it does have a slightly better record in this respect than some UK publications. But it’s certainly long past time that we put an end to the myth that Alamy, Getty, Corbis, AP, Reuters etc make photographs.
One of the images was taken by the Guardian’s first staff photographer, Walter Doughty, who was appointed in 1908. In 1922 he was in a Dublin bank in O’Connell Street behind an Irish Free State Soldier kneeling in a suicidal position in front of a window shattered by bullets from the hotel across the street during the civil war between the newly founded Irish Free State and the republicans. His image was published in the Manchester Evening News. It perhaps says something about the industry attitude to photography that Doughty’s glass plates were then lost until 2000 when a later Guardian photographer, Don McPhee came across them in the abandoned darkrooms and realised their worth. You can see another image by Doughty and learn more about him in the page about the show, A Long Exposure, of 100 years of Photography at the Guardian which was held at The Lowry last year, and also watch a short slide show with a conversation about the images between photographer and curator Denis Thorpe and Guardian northern editor Martin Wainwright. Doughty, who stayed with the paper until 1949, apparently never got a byline.
Although I wish it had perhaps focussed more on the subject, this is an interesting read, and if – like me – you don’t buy the Observer on Sundays and the Guardian every day it’s probably worth asking your friends who do but have less interest in photography to pass their copies of the series on to you. You can also see a small selection of ten ‘Great Press Photographs‘ online.
