Why is photography so American?
Most Americans think of the twentieth century as essentially an American century, and with good reason. It was (mostly) the period in which the United States grew economically and politically to dominate the world stage. It was also the period when photography blossomed professionally, and as art, and for amateurs, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that Americans tended to think that photography belonged to them. As (American) art historian Gretchen Garner wrote in her excellent book Disappearing Witness, “for most of the twentieth century, photography flourished most strongly in the United States.” For the first two-thirds, until approximately the beginning of the 1970s, photography was universally understood to have one job, to document. It showed its audiences how things looked, how people looked and behaved, the unfolding of events on the world stage and in ordinary street scenes. Sometimes photographers idealised, invented, even distorted the truth, but the broad direction was still the same: making a visual record of life and the world. Things changed rather when photography discovered post-modernism in the ’70s, and even more so with digital and broadband, but these are another story for another time. The point is that photography found its documentary rôle while America was booming, and it made for an effective relationship.
But this alone doesn’t seem to explain how America came to dominate the world of photography, which it still does, however you care to measure it – pictures published, forums, blogs. I write books on photography, and while they are in 17 languages, the United States is by far the largest market. And that, I think, is where the answer lies, in the market for looking at photographs and taking photographs. It’s to do with size, and with how government and corporate America works.
But wait. Isn’t photography supposed to be universal, to cross barriers of culture and language? Wasn’t that the idea behind the hugely popular exhibition The Family of Man mounted in 1955 by Edward Steichen? He wrote that it’s goals were “to show the relationship of man to man; to demonstrate what a wonderfully effective language photography is in explaining man to man…” And later, Cornell Capa, photographer, curator and younger brother of Robert Capa, wrote that photography “is the most vital, effective and universal means of communication of facts and ideas between people and between nations.”
This may be true, but while photography might be a universal means of communication, the twentieth-century media that delivered it to audiences was not. Photography flourished more than anywhere else in magazines, especially in the great picture magazines like Life, Look, Picture Post, Paris-Match and National Geographic. But magazines are language-specific, and what America had was the largest affluent market for print media in the world. It still does, for that matter, as anyone in book publishing knows. Life magazine’s circulation at its peak was 13.5 million copies a week; the National Geographic is now nine million copies a month. In these two areas, weekly and monthly, no other picture magazine has ever come anywhere close. And until the decline set in in the 1970s, picture magazines were the vehicle for important photography (National Geographic still is, a healthy exception). That made magazines like Life the arbiters of what and who was good in photography, so there was naturally an American-centric bias. America has something of a corporate sensibility. Large corporations get a measure of public respect that they do not in Europe. Part of the reason is that Americans are joiners by nature, whatever the myth of rugged frontiersman independence. Not only this, but corporate America and government have generally worked together. Hence all the major picture magazines have been essentially conservative by nature and ‘American’ in spirit.
Photography in America has also notably been supported and directed by non-media organisations. One of the most powerful in its time was the Farm Security Administration, which in the 1930s commissioned photographers like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn to document the Depression in rural areas. Then again, in the 1960s came the National Endowment for the Arts, with grants for those photographers who were hooked into the art-academic world. Several million dollars were disbursed this way up to 1980, and as this was also the time when the Museum of Modern Art began to have great influence under its new curator of photography John Szarkowski, American photography began to be moulded and supported in an organisational way. Writers from outside the field, like Susan Sontag, chimed in, and before long there was a whole raft of graduate programs in photography in colleges and universities. In effect, American photography acquired academic official status and even more prominence, which never happened to anything like this extent in any other country.
In summary, a large and affluent market with a common language and many common cultural ideals allowed the growth of picture magazines, at a time when they were the main vehicle for displaying photography. Added to this was quasi-official support from government bodies and the academic art world. The result: American photography, which still enjoys the momentum that all this built up. Perhaps some sort of critical mass has been reached, and this will continue. But quite possibly not. Photography is no longer ruled by magazines. No longer even by print media, although it’s print that pays photographers to reproduce their work much more than does on-line media. If photography comes more and more to be published on-line on millions of independent websites and through forums, the centre of gravity may shift. One thing, however, is clear. Photography thrives on discussion and comment, on the words that surround it. It was only ever an ideal that photography could rise above language, and common language is the stage.
