John Stathatos
REVISIONS: An exhibition curated by Ian Jeffrey

If erudition, perspicacity and a willingness to flout orthodoxy are what make good art criticism, then Ian Jeffrey is undoubtedly our most stimulating photography critic. His classic Photography: A Concise History adopted an articulated narrative focusing on a limited number of significant figures, beginning with Fox Talbot and ending with Chris Killip; it was obvious, however, that even in 1981 the author had reservations about the canonical approach, which to a certain extent he undermined by basing his narrative on photography's response to external stimuli. Jeffrey's introduction addressed the dilemma directly, conceding that while "there is, it is true, a generally agreed photographic canon… no one could claim with any confidence that we know all of the major photographers who have ever worked, or that we ever will. […] Nor has there ever been a mainstream in photography, only strong currents evident here and there for brief periods". In conclusion, he added, "it would be possible, and perhaps justifiable, to write a history in which individuals scarcely appear, one in which credit is given to impersonal ideological determinants".
Nearly two decades later, Jeffrey has produced just such a history in Revisions: An Alternative History of Photography, an exhibition and substantial catalogue celebrating the relaunch of the National Museum of Photography in Bradford. Based for the most part on the museum's extensive (and largely unfamiliar) collections, the exhibition was divided into a number of sections corresponding to what the curator called "moments of startlement"; occurring at significant technological, aesthetic or historical cruxes, these range from the essentially private experience of the daguerreotype through photomicrography, stereo photography and the earliest snapshots to wire photos and the digital age.
     Such an eclectic accumulation of images can be disconcerting, as the opening sentences of the catalogue essay explicitly acknowledge: "This exhibition… has to be justified, because it contains a lot of material not often considered in histories of photography, and which is even alien to such histories. Its theory is of a steady state in photography disrupted… by new formats [and] …by startling and outlandish subject matter of the kind generated by war and technology. The theory also goes on to suggest that [this] material… constitutes photography proper, and with better claims to that position than anything produced by the medium's major artists".
     This last proposition has a glorious audacity which is likely to disconcert most photographic historians (or, indeed, photographic artists), but Jeffrey's impassioned championing of "homeless imagery" is largely justified by the extraordinary quality of many of the exhibition's unfamiliar images, among them Richard Calvert Jones' two-part 'joiner' Neapolitan landscapes (1845), the oddly surrealist Alpine stereocards of Adolphe Braun and Tiarraz with their strings of climbers disposed along the crests of glaciers (1860s), Nasmyth & Carpenter's comparative plates in The Moon Considered as a Planet, a World and a Satellite (1874), the intensely graphic x-ray images of Eder & Valenta (1896), the strange urban panoramas made around 1902 on Kodak printing-out paper, and the ghostly American wire photos of the forties and fifties.
     Above all, the catalogue is notable for Jeffrey's remarkable insights into the medium and its development. Of early snapshot photography, he notes that "a snapshot of 1889 had a moment of maximal use when its author recalled time and place… but thereafter it could only fall into desuetude, its narratives forgotten. The more this happens, the more mysterious and even tragic these pictures become… Snapshot photography, at least as practised by Kodak's travellers of 1889-90, revealed an existential vacancy which would have intrigued post-modernist artists a century later".
     Considering documentary photography in the thirties, he writes that for its practitioners, "photographs were transparent or they were nothing", since photographic modernism "was predicated on transparency, or on a sense of immediate access to the world". Observing that wirephoto prints were routinely improved and hand-rectified on reception, he comments that "these crude 'painted pictures' constitute photography's own brand of Neo-Expressionism". Finally, faced with the casual brutality characteristic of Vietnamese war photo-reportage , Jeffrey points out the irony that "Buddhist Vietnam was exactly the sort of culture which The Family of Man was meant to honour, for its people were pious, tradition-conscious and largely agrarian… Then all of a sudden it seemed as if this exemplification of paradise on earth had been singled out for a demonstration of fire-power unequalled in 1939-1945". Any one of these glosses could (and no doubt eventually will) provide the inspiration for a full-blown thesis.

The catalogue of Revisions is available from the National Museum of Photography,
Film & Television, Bradford, BD1 1NQ (ISBN 0 948489 60 X)
© John Stathatos, 1999
First published in Portfolio 30, Edinburgh, December 1999
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