The Genius of Photography (2007) s01e03 Episode Script
Right Place, Right Time?
The Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris.
In 1933, something was captured near here by artist and photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Armed with a revolutionary new camera, he shot a moment.
This moment.
It took only a fraction of a second to bag, but came to be known as "a decisive moment", now the most familiar concept in all of photography.
It's a strategy that has illuminated photography's potential for all of us.
In Germany that same year, Hitler's National Socialist Party enjoyed its own moment.
Within six years, the decisive moment and the historical moment would collide on the battlefields of Europe.
The result would be iconic images of war by legendary photojournalists like Robert Capa.
Photojournalism was born in the chaos of modern warfare.
But when the fighting finally stopped, the question remained of just how good photography had been at explaining what all the blood and suffering had been about.
(Danto) We thought that was the world.
Now we realise there were a lot of myths in that.
I mean, trusting the photograph was probably a huge mistake from the beginning.
This is Henri Cartier-Bresson, the godfather of photojournalism.
From the early 1930s, he prowled the streets, snapping moments, fleeting action that found its perfect expression and true meaning through the content and composition of the picture.
Bresson, a surrealist sympathiser, always maintained that he was first and foremost a painter, but his "decisive moments" transformed the face of photography.
(Meyerowitz) Bresson's pictures were about being in the right place at the right time.
He could step into a space and see the theatrical possibilities.
It might be at the top of a flight of stairs that wended their way down to the street below, and he had a sense, "If I hang out here, someone's gonna bike along.
" He understood that into this space life will come.
So it's a game of pounce.
Cartier-Bresson was a had been a big-game hunter.
He'd he'd gone shooting things and he was a stalker.
You had to wait for this animal to appear.
You stalked that animal, and at that moment you had to be ready to shoot.
Photographers pounce on this fraction of a second because there's a capacity to read all of this flux of of daily life, and see in it, in that tiny moment, some truth.
(Train chuffing) Bresson's photograph of a man jumping over a puddle in Paris is a classic example of a decisive moment, seemingly casual but charged with significance.
To some people it's a picture of a guy jumping over a puddle, but there there's that sort of generic European Jewish name on the poster.
There's the guy jumping into the unknown.
The broken hoop.
The first thing, probably, man ever made was a wheel, and this is a broken one.
And throughout history, people have referred to the broken hoop and the wheel that's cracked and so forth.
That must have been for hundreds of years the biggest thousands of years, probably the biggest disaster that could happen to anyone is have your wheel break.
He was the Nostradamus of the early '30s who predicted what was gonna happen to Europe in that one single image.
Europe jumping into the unknown.
And it's a great, great photograph for that reason.
The interesting thing about photography is that you know when you press that shutter whether that visual orgasm has occurred or not.
You sort of know it.
It it bypasses bits of the brain that and your eye.
You just know it.
The feeling you get when you look at it, which is that this guy has turned round and snapped, and caught a moment, that's not how it was.
And I think that that's a big fantasy that the photography world has suggested, is that people have just got this kind of God-given gift of capturing something.
(Oliver Chanarin) So many decisions have been made, in quite a measured way, up until the point that that picture was taken.
The photographer's decided where to be, they've decided once they're there where they're gonna take the picture from, what camera they're gonna use, what film they're gonna use.
They've made all these decisions.
That he'd waited for it? Yeah.
That doesn't mean to say that he said, "Here's 50 francs.
Jump over this puddle.
" Or "Can you bring a broken hoop in?" Nonsense.
Of course not.
He saw something.
He pushed the camera through a gap in the fence and got what I have personally described as "the greatest photograph of the 20th century".
(Danto) You've got to remember about Cartier-Bresson that he was a surrealist.
That was his milieu.
The the surrealists really did believe that there was a super-reality behind appearances, and occasionally it would reveal itself, and you'd just have to wait for that to happen.
- (Gasps) - (Shutter clicks) That's what makes me gasp, you know.
- (Shutter clicks) - I'm awake.
When the action enters the physical space, he knows how to time it so that it reaches its apogee - (Shutter clicks) at a point, and that's the decisive moment.
Bresson was only able to capture such moments because of a revolutionary development in camera technology.
The Leica, launched in Germany in 1925.
Compact, quiet, and with the latest lens technology, it gave birth to a whole new style of instant photography.
(Danto) He must have had one of the first Leicas.
There couldn't have been very many on the market.
He he was a rich boy.
He had enough money, at any rate, to have that.
And I think that was the moment, in in a way, that nobody ever would have anticipated.
It allows allows you to really be present in the moment and glide through the moment.
The thing about it is that the window is here so when you look through the camera this eye is open so that you can actually watch the world.
Most other single-lens reflex cameras go in front of your face so they block off the vision.
The Leica was the chosen tool of Hungarian-born photojournalist Robert Capa, who became famous for capturing the ultimate in decisive moments - (Shutter clicks) the death of a Spanish Civil War soldier cut down by a bullet in 1936.
When civil war became world war, in 1939, Capa brought fame, heroism and charisma to the war photographer.
Working for Life magazine, he maintained that the first rule of photojournalism was to get close and the second, to get closer.
It earned him a reputation as the world's greatest war photographer, and its first real celebrity.
I envied him because he was handsome and he attracted all the women.
And Capa was a superb journalist.
I always hesitated to call him a great photographer, but I called him a great journalist.
It was astounding, I think, to me as a young teenager, that a photographer could risk his life.
The idea that photography was that important was simply mind-boggling.
Ultimately what one wants to say is, "This picture, I believe it, "because of that name under it, or on the back of the print," because we know that he sticks to what photography's always been best at doing, which is capturing reality.
People believe pictures.
It's a photograph that's in your passport, not a painting.
Now, George Bernard Shaw said, "I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.
" That's what the power of photography is.
The power of a famous photojournalist like Capa was to be able to choose his battles, to drop in and out of the conflict.
In less glamorous circumstances, Tony Vaccaro photographed World War II, not on assignment but on a daily basis as an ordinary GI.
Tony had been a soldier in the war, and, of course, soldiers don't get recognition for their photo He had been a a soldier photographer, and he made perhaps the best pictures of World War II of any soldier photographer.
The camera was always on my neck, never on my shoulder.
On my neck.
And a gun always here.
And I could easily hold the gun and do this.
(Shutter clicks) (John Morris) It's strange that some photographers who deserve great recognition never achieve it.
My guess is that Tony was primarily a journalist even as a soldier.
And I think that's why his record of the war from a soldier's standpoint is so outstanding.
The regular soldier photographer was expected to record events with standard army equipment.
The issue camera was the Speed Graphic.
That's insane.
Here it is, the Speed Graphic.
You focus through there.
You can, er This has two pictures.
The film is placed underneath this.
You close this.
You see the accident? I pulled both out.
Then you look through here to take a picture.
Turn it over.
Meantime, bullets are going around.
See what things can happen.
Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
Thirty-two pictures.
35mm camera.
All we need is 36 here.
(Shutter clicks) Vaccaro's ambitions to be a photojournalist meant that he had to do better than the cumbersome Speed Graphic.
Unlike Capa, he couldn't afford a Leica and went to war with the more modest Argus C3.
(Vaccaro) I am compared with Robert Capa quite often, because he took a picture of a soldier dying in front of his camera, I took a picture of a soldier dying in front of my camera.
He maintained, and he got this from Hemingway, that war is romantic.
I'm sorry.
I said, "Bob, you are dead wrong.
" As a soldier, Vaccaro couldn't help but be close to the action.
Closer even than Capa.
When a German tank was bombed right in front of his eyes, it was photography, not survival, that he was thinking about.
I see the turret open, and came out this person.
He was fine, but soon as he opened the turret, he blew up.
Something happened that diesel went all over, and he's burning.
I heard his "Mutter, Mutter.
" "Mother, Mother," he was saying to himself.
Now I am down.
I felt that the picture should be taken a little higher.
And so I went on the tip of my toes, and as I am there and clicked, I hear bullets hitting the tank, on this side, "Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh!" And I dove and landed here with my head.
I stayed down and I look at him and I read what he has here for the first time, "Gott mit uns," "God is with us.
" 0n D-day, the greatest military operation in history, involving over one million men on the Allied side alone, Robert Capa was the only photojournalist who went with the first wave of troops onto 0maha Beach to capture nothing less than the very face of history in the making.
Everyone was waiting for pictures.
Life magazine was under extreme deadline pressure to publish.
But it was 48 hours before picture editor John Morris received Capa's exposed film.
So I asked the darkroom to rush development and there were four rolls of 35mm and Bob had written a note saying that all the action was in those four rolls and those were the the pictures he took as he'd landed.
And a few moments after I gave the command, if you want to call it that, this young hysterical darkroom boy came rushing into my office saying the films were all ruined, and I said "What happened?" And he said, "Well, you were in such a hurry, "I put the the four rolls in the drying cabinet and closed the doors," which was not normal procedure.
And there was too much heat and the emulsion ran.
So I ran back and found that there were three rolls were gone but on the fourth there were 11 frames and those are the ones that, fortunately, survived.
These are perhaps the most famous of all war images, pictures that say as much about the challenge of being in the right place at the right time with a camera as they do about the experience of fighting for your country and for your life.
Without the luxury of a magazine back home waiting to process his vulnerable film, Tony Vaccaro decided to develop it himself on the battlefield in soldiers' helmets.
But he needed the right chemicals.
(Tony Vaccaro) One day, I went into a town called Saint-Denis, and I found the ruins of a camera store.
I look in I start removing rocks, and there it is, you know? The chemicals.
I'm standing in a foxhole, and I put the chemical in the first helmet, water in the next, hypo in the third and water in the fourth helmet.
And a moonless night.
June of 1944.
And I remove the film from the cassette and I start my first roll, you know, going like this.
And I had one of those timers that I could see at night, you know.
I would check 11 minutes.
And at 11 minutes I shake it a little, went into the water a couple of turns, then into the hypo for five minutes.
I check the time, and then, er shake it a little.
And into the water.
Change the water a couple of times.
That was it.
And I'd hang the film, the negatives now, on the branches of the nearest tree.
And next morning And I went to sleep and the thing is there.
(Chuckles) So I went to sleep.
I woke up.
I look.
Perfect.
But the ten rolls Vaccaro developed that night were destroyed by the army censor.
They contained images of dead Gls, decisive moments the world wasn't yet ready to accept.
After the war, Capa went to Hollywood to take pictures on the set of Hitchcock's film Notorious.
Tony Vaccaro stayed in Germany, photographing its occupation and reconstruction.
What had photography really done for our understanding of events in World War II? It had captured important moments, many of which were close up and personal.
It seemed good at effects but bad at causes.
It suggested that history is about more than meets the eye.
There is so much more to the things that we think we know from afar, that the closer you get to it, the more complex it is, not the simpler it is to understand.
When you're photographing anything to do with war and conflict, you're photographing something impossible, you're photographing a Everything you do is just clumsy and stupid and half-witted, because it's impossible to to portray the full width and breadth of the things that you're up against.
It's kind of like from a the difference of maybe looking at a mosaic from afar where you have a myriad of pieces that give you a sense of an image, and then the closer you get to it, it starts to pixelate and fall apart, but you really have to stand far back, and the closer you get, the less sure you are of how well these little pieces fit together.
(Narrator) Photography had already shown that there was an alternative to being in the right place at the right time.
This is Roger Fenton's picture, called The Valley 0f The Shadow 0f Death, taken in 1885, a year after The Charge 0f The Light Brigade.
Cannonballs were all he had to play with but it says as much about the nature of war as any image from the front line.
That's a picture that has no dead bodies in it, no exploded buildings, but it's a powerful picture in terms of what was the experience like to have been in that place at that time, to have saddled on and clippety-clopped "half a league, half a league onward" through that hail of cannonballs.
And yet the picture doesn't have any of those things in it, apart from just this detritus of cannonballs.
It draws you in and says, "Imagine what it would be like for you to run through this place.
" The history of photography is littered with images taken long after the event, pictures that still speak eloquently about what had already happened.
This is a photograph of a bullet-torn, bloodstained shirt, the one worn by the Archduke Maximilian when he faced a Mexican firing squad.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, photography's task became horribly simple, to provide undeniable historical proof of Nazi atrocities, documenting crime scenes of unimaginable proportions.
But after the war, the tangled relationship between photography and historical truth would become apparent even in a calamity as black-and-white as the Holocaust.
(Ringing) This is Lodz in Poland, the site of an infamous Nazi ghetto.
It was here that Henryk Ross, along with 164,000 other Polish Jews, was incarcerated for four years until the ghetto was liquidated in 1944.
But Ross was a photographer, and he kept a unique record of what really happened here.
The Nazis had put the running and policing of the ghetto in Jewish hands, a situation that created a system of privilege among its inhabitants.
There were those who had the merest chance of survival and those who had none.
Among his many duties as one of the ghetto's official photographers, Ross had to document the production of goods by the inhabitants of Lodz, sold to make money for their captors.
Ross was a propaganda photographer at one level.
I mean, he was employed by the Department of Administration and Statistics.
He produced identity card pictures.
He worked within the graphics department that had the responsibility for promoting the goods that were made in the ghetto and which many people would would view as a form of collaboration.
This building was the Department of Administration and Statistics, where Ross worked.
Although he had become a propaganda photographer for his German jailers, he was a photojournalist before the war.
Simply by looking out of his office window here, he could see that life for the Jews was becoming progressively worse.
He decided to document it.
We're in the apartment of some people whose breakfast we've interrupted.
So this is where the the bridge was over the main street.
This is Zgierska Street, part of the main thoroughfare of Lodz, which was known here as Aryan Street.
And initially when I think when the ghetto was set up, Jews could cross at leisure, but gradually restrictions came in and and the bridge was built and at the point that Jews couldn't walk on the street at all.
Lodz wasn't a death camp but it was a staging post.
Most of its inhabitants were eventually deported from here on trains, never to be seen again.
The early deportations were to Chelmno, which is in that direction.
That was the death camp that the the Nazis initially set up.
And as they perfected their methods at Auschwitz, which is in that direction, that's where the majority of the Jews of Lodz were ultimately sent.
Part of the way Ross saw his role, his responsibility, even, as a photographer, was to document what was happening here and he was able one night to smuggle himself in, spent the night in the building to the side here, documenting one of the deportations, as German troops herded people onto these carriages or carriages like them.
He almost certainly would have been killed, as as would his family, had he been caught.
(Birdsong) This is what remains of the hospital in Lodz Ghetto, where Ross photographed Jewish police preventing the sick and elderly from escaping, knowing that they were being rounded up for deportation.
(Chris Boot) Ross obviously enjoyed free movement within the police.
I mean, the Jewish police had no problem with him, and it doesn't look from the pictures like they had a problem with him photographing them.
So I don't think he was taking the same degree of risk as he was down at the railway station while people were being deported on trains.
This was him trying to use his camera as a vehicle for recording these important moments.
I mean, the other pictures that he took that he was clear that he was risking his life taking was of the hangings in the ghetto square.
Before the liquidation of the ghetto, Ross buried all his negatives in this garden, hoping they might survive even if he didn't.
Amazingly, both he and the negatives did, and in 1961 his most incriminating pictures helped hang war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
But there were other photographs Ross had taken that had no place in the courtroom and until recently no place in our image of the Holocaust.
As well as his other pictures, Ross had, in an unselfconscious way, photographed the everyday life of the ghetto, including marriages, religious ceremonies, and parties.
In these pictures we see a happy, well-fed Jewish elite and scenes that show some uncomfortable truths about the ghetto system, like a little boy dressed up as a Lodz policeman in his own ghetto-made uniform, playing a game of "arrest your best playmate".
The battle over this material is partly the argument partly rests in the argument that nobody there was no joy in the ghetto, and these pictures certainly do challenge that.
Contrary to any thought that they might complicate the picture of German cruelty, or any question about the extent of the Holocaust, they actually give a very, very clear idea of how the German war machine in that period managed the Holocaust.
There's something very immediate about photography.
There's something very powerful about these pictures.
You can't look at these pictures without knowing that everyone or almost everyone in them was killed before the war was over.
Photo-historian Chris Boot recently published a more representative selection of Ross's images as well as organising public events to discuss the pictures.
Anyone who had survived the ghetto might now see them for the first time.
I was sitting with my daughter and we started seeing these photographs, and suddenly I said, "Oh, I knew this person.
" Another photograph appeared.
I said, "I knew this person.
" And we come to the last photograph, and I looked at this photograph and I said, "I knew this person very well, "this man playing the accordion was my boyfriend, my first love, "and and in the camp.
" And suddenly my daughter, who sat next to me, said to me, "But, Mummy, you are next to him.
" Well, I was just I was laughing, crying, I I just didn't know how to react.
It it was amazing.
Amazing feeling.
No, there were fun times.
There were concerts.
There were theatres, Jewish theatres.
There were hairdressers, there were It was a little Jewish state.
And hunger, yes.
You you eat pieces from the wall.
You eat any anything.
And and for many years, I didn't want to think about it.
- (Man) Are you glad to see those pictures? - Yes, absolutely.
Yes.
(Man) More than you're upset by them? More than I'm sad, yes.
I'm I'm very pleased to see them.
In Japan, the photographic legacy of World War II proved to be even more indecisive and tangled than in the victorious West.
The physical impact of the war here had been so different that even the simple act of conveying its horrors wasn't easy.
(John Dower) These cities were so crowded and the construction was so flimsy that they dropped almost 100% incendiaries and just burned out the cities.
There is no really stunning photography of Japan after the war comparable to the photography of German cities because the German cities always have those masonry and church steeples rising to the sky.
There were still things standing.
But here everything is flat burned out.
There aren't even any bomb craters, and so it's very difficult to photograph.
In two of the most decisive moments in history, August 6th and August 9th 1945, the Americans detonated atomic bombs above the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Two flashes killed over 200,000 Japanese in an instant.
The American military's photographic records of what remained are extensive.
But unlike photographic records of the Holocaust, their pictures completely ignored any evidence of human suffering.
They were interested in physical damage, because their task was to measure, "What is the effect of the bomb 100 metres, 200 metres, "1,000 metres, 8,000 metres from the epicentre?" What the Americans turn their cameras away from is the human victims.
This is a surviving copy of the very magazine that finally delivered photographic evidence of the human cost to the Japanese, seven years after the event.
Japanese photographers had begun taking pictures within hours of the blasts but their images were confiscated by the Americans and suppressed until the end of their occupation.
Jostling for position next to ads featuring Grace Kelly lookalikes, these are the images that helped Japan begin to view itself not only as the aggressor but also the victim.
But pictures like these were still nowhere to be seen when photography made its most public statement on behalf of humanity only three years later.
Photography's big response to a world rapidly moving from hot to cold war was this.
The Family 0f Man, an exhibition that opened in New York in 1955, comprised of over 500 images, from 273 photographers both amateur and professional.
It was selected from literally millions of images.
Five travelling versions toured the world, netting nine million visitors by 1964.
Staged as a walk-through version of Life magazine, it would be the most popular photographic show of all time, photography's biggest moment.
(David Campany) We'd had 20 or so years of mass-media magazines.
It's just at the dawning of television.
So in many ways it's a last statement about photography as the defining mass medium of the age.
That statement is still standing over 50 years later inside this fairytale-like castle in Clervaux, Luxembourg.
The exact same prints, carefully orchestrated to preach the exact same humanistic message, "We're all the same underneath", can still be seen in all its timeless naive wonder.
0r you can buy the book, which has never been out of print.
There is a sense of the audience for the show being encouraged into a kind of dream state, something rather removed, actually, from social realities.
Although the pictures all come from social realities, they're brought together to make this slightly abstract tone poem about what it is to be human.
We all live, we all die, we all laugh, we all cry, sometimes we go to war, avoids the real historical and political and economic and ideological factors that affect everybody's lives, and prevents them from being a family of man.
The show was a sticking plaster for the wounds of war.
But it represented everything photojournalism's deity Henri Cartier-Bresson stood for.
He had several images in the exhibition.
But the younger generation of photographers like Robert Frank were against having their pictures used to prop up nothing more than well-intentioned propaganda.
(David Campany) What the show suppresses, if you like, is the individual view of the photographer.
You'd get the impression, going around the show, that all the photographers felt the same, that the photographers were themselves a family of man, and this is just not true.
The exhibition still concludes with an optimistic cliché, W Eugene Smith's photograph of his own children walking in his own garden out into the light, the beginning of their sentimental journey through life.
Smith embraced the show's humanistic message, but the very year it opened, he proved in dramatic fashion that he was firmly outside any photographic family.
In 1947, top photojournalists Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour, had created the photo agency Magnum.
Formed as a cooperative, it declared that its photographers would retain their negatives and copyright in their pictures.
Smith would join them later and drag an infant Magnum to near bankruptcy.
But for now he was a star turn at Life magazine.
I first worked with James Smith, uh I think it was in October 1939.
I was just a young reporter on the Life magazine staff.
He wanted to photograph war the way it was.
He he made pictures which are you know, in some ways more damning of war than Robert Capa's pictures.
I mean, he he made a sea of corpses.
He refused to let Life touch his negatives, uh if he could help it.
I remember Ed Thompson, the managing editor, saying to me once, "If you want to put Smith on that story, you you do it.
"I don't want anything to do with him.
" Anyway, Smith was the most difficult man I ever knew.
(Chuckles) Smith became America's greatest photo essayist.
But his increasingly obsessive pursuit of the story caused Life magazine problems.
For the assignment "Country Doctor", he stalked his subject for 23 days, ignoring demands from his employers that he return.
In 1955, he quit Life, joined Magnum, and came here to Pittsburgh for his first routine independent assignment, to produce 100 photographs in three weeks to celebrate the city's centenary.
But Smith's real plan was much more ambitious.
Three weeks turned into a three-year commitment, as he attempted to describe, understand, and better the world he saw around him, with no less than 21,000 photographic moments.
(Sam Stephenson) Eugene Smith loved William Faulkner, and he had clips of William Faulkner's quotes all over his loft.
And one of the quotes was about Thomas Wolfe, the writer.
William Faulkner said that Wolfe was trying to put the entire history of the human heart on the head of a pin.
And I think that's what Smith was trying to do with his photography.
He really thought that when he finished his Pittsburgh project, people were gonna look at it and change their behaviour.
You know, culture was gonna be changed by what he was showing.
When he came here to Pittsburgh, he saw nature, this extraordinary geographic environment here, the natural environment, and the heaviest industry America ever had, and immigrants from all over Europe were here.
There was destruction and construction.
There was wealth and poverty.
There was these beautiful rivers and it all just came together into this one bundle here in Pittsburgh.
He was ready to erupt with a massive photographic project and I really believe that it would have happened no matter where he'd gone, because he quit Life magazine in January of 1955, and his mother died in February of 1955.
His relationship with his mother was was deep and complex.
She was domineering and she was always telling him how bad he was doing, and how, you know, even when he was world famous, she would write him letters and say, "Gene, when are you gonna wake up and do something worthwhile?" (Dog barking) Smith never "woke up", perhaps because he rarely ever went to sleep, which was hard on his photographic assistants.
(Harold Feinstein) I'd be working till three in the morning, and flop out, and, uh the next morning at ten he's still working.
But he used to use amphetamines.
We didn't know that word then.
It was called Dexedrine, which even my sisters used to use to lose weight.
I I never thought of it as speed.
Smith took amphetamines constantly, like like dozens of pills every day.
They were for the purpose of keeping him awake, so he could accomplish more work.
He was addicted to his work, and in his life there's not a lot of evidence that he did much else besides work.
But he was also addicted to alcohol, and he would go in these cycles of up and down, and Harold told me that, uh He was joking but he said they used to drink ferrous cyanide, acid that they used to bleach their prints to increase the contrast between light and dark colours, and Harold said they used to drink the stuff.
With the original assignment long lost, Smith now began draining Magnum's meagre coffers.
Spiralling into bankruptcy and professional suicide, he eventually chose 2,000 core images of Pittsburgh selected from 7,000 prints that had been painstakingly crafted.
(Harold Feinstein) I always sensed the demon was his mother.
But the problem the reason he was crazy is he cared.
I was a master printer at the time so I could do some of his printing, and his printing was extraordinary.
He had a sense of of darkening and lightening.
He used to use ferrous cyanide, which could accentuate the lighting in certain areas of the print.
He cared about the details.
He cared about the whole thing.
At that point, the photographer was someone you sent out to point a camera to take a picture of that and that and that.
W Eugene Smith's photo essay of Pittsburgh was never sold.
His magnum opus ended up pinned to bulletin boards all around his loft.
The world he wanted to change never saw it.
I was unpublishable.
It really was.
It was unpublishable from the start.
And there was no way to publish 2,000 photographs in a book.
There was no way to exhibit them anywhere.
That's one of the mysteries of this story of Smith and why did he care so much about his work.
And I think it's the same question you ask about, you know, prophets, Old Testament prophets.
Why did they care so much? And Smith certainly saw himself in that light.
I mean, he really believed that there was a truth that he could find, and I don't think that people believe that today.
Smith's Pittsburgh project suggested that decisive moments, even in their thousands, were not enough to get to the bottom of the American postwar experience.
For Japanese photographers, the legacy of the past and the political complexities of the present were even harder to unravel.
America had continued to use the Pacific as a nuclear test site throughout the early '50s and the Japanese had once again suffered casualties.
As part of a growing anti-nuclear movement in Japan, in the early '60s photographers returned to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the first time since 1945.
Tomatsu went down to Nagasaki and did some of the really, really iconic photographs that we now associate with Nagasaki.
Shomei Tomatsu has become one of Japan's greatest photographers.
But in 1961 he was just a kid on an assignment.
Sixteen years after the event, there would be no D-day photo opportunity in Nagasaki and no place for a traditional war photographer.
(Tomatsu speaks Japanese) (Translator) I saw for the first time how these people had been living for 16 years.
Over that time, Nagasaki had turned into an exotic place, like Naples.
And for the most part, there was no evidence of what had happened.
Bomb victims found it embarrassing to go out in public, so they didn't go out much at all, and a lot of them would avoid any form of eye contact with other people.
Even after 16 years, those around them, especially children, didn't know they were bomb victims.
When they got on the buses, for example, children would shout, "There's a ghost!" Even though they were all living together, these people were forgotten in their own communities.
The culture shock was so great, I couldn't process my feelings while I was working.
Later, when it wasn't my job any more, for many years I went back.
And every time I returned, I got to know the people I photographed even more.
Tomatsu didn't only photograph those who carried the terrible and psychological effects of the blast, but other kinds of scars.
(John Dower) Shattered Christian statues, broken statues that had been blackened and charred, very powerful.
(Watch ticking) A very simple item suddenly becomes awesome, like a pocket watch that suddenly stopped at the time the bomb fell.
(Stops ticking) Or a bottle that has been twisted into some almost like a grotesque deformed human foetus, you know, and it's the notion that the world we cherish, which is a world of ordinary objects, and everyday things, no longer exists.
Tomatsu's images are, in some respects, a return to The Valley 0f The Shadow 0f Death.
They question the very necessity to be present during the action, a red rag to the classic war photographer.
The great thing about photography is, unlike almost all the other art forms, is to practise, you have to be there.
And as the great master Cartier-Bresson says, as you discover the external world, you discover more about the internal world, and it's an upward spiral, and in the end you become eloquent at telling and seeing and understanding, and your pictures are great for that reason.
Given the choice, you're always there before it happens.
Next choice is when it happens and third choice is when it's all over.
And the problem often is that once the circus has left town, it's a pretty boring town.
I think the days of that kind of classic photojournalist, you know, the kind of testosterone-driven, main kind of macho guy, out at the front line, is over.
Watching somebody, you know, falling backwards, dying from a bullet, what is that telling us? You know, we kind of learn to accept this notion that war is inevitable and these are kind of ritual punctuations that we're gonna see every day when we open up the newspaper.
Photographs have become important in a different way.
The medium has, by its nature, become a more reflective look at things.
Generally, photographers arrive in places after the event now, rather than at the event.
During a real event, you have TV crews up at the front.
Then the photographers come in and make something more more of an analysis, perhaps.
This is a good example of how we would approach the theme or the subject of suicide, a suicide bomb, rather than showing blood, blood, pools of blood on the street minutes after it's happened.
I think there's something more sinister and more unnerving about these images, which are recreations of real suicide bombs that Palestinians have built, and disguised as as everyday objects, as a watermelon, you can see.
Broomberg and Chanarin's photographs are, like the image of a stopped watch or a twisted bottle, pictures of the relics of war.
Photographs of seemingly innocent, everyday objects made chilling by what they speak of, not what they show.
(Birdsong) But what happens when warfare becomes invisible? The 0uter Hebrides.
No bullets flying.
No bombs exploding.
Modern conflict at its most covert.
A challenge for photographer Simon Norfolk.
These waters off the coast of these islands, between the Outer Hebrides and Scotland, are the largest submarine exercise area in Europe.
This airspace is the biggest low-flying training zone in Europe.
This island here has the biggest I think it's the biggest in the world, testing range where you can fire missiles.
The fact that you can't see the troposphere, you can't see the submarines, and you can't see the ionosphere, and you can't see the radar systems, I think just makes it more interesting to me, really.
I wanted to talk about this particular submarine exercise area.
The light was gorgeous.
I found that the colour was great.
And the presence of the salmon nets in the water is slightly odd, strange, slightly surreal.
And also politically very interesting, because I was looking at the right thing.
So it felt like several units just started to stack up.
So you you get a feeling about things.
All the interesting stuff that happens in war is happening in these spheres.
The money is not being built on spending a new battle tank.
Moving men around in little metal boxes round a desert is totally 1980s.
Heroism's changed.
War has changed.
But photojournalism is still stuck in the 1940s.
My argument is that even if not a single picture is ever published, they exist, and that means that we are recording the history of the human race.
If that's all you're doing, it's still a very, very worthwhile profession to be involved in.
Whatever the arguments about photography and how it deals with history, when you are in the right place at the right time, it's a question of shoot first and ask questions later.
This is Ground Zero in New York.
Today, anyone can take their own pictures of where the Twin Towers once stood.
But on the day, photographer Joel Meyerowitz discovered this wasn't so easy.
(Meyerowitz) I did something I've done my entire life.
I picked up my Leica.
And as I put it to my eye, someone behind me punched me on my shoulder.
I turn around and it's a black woman cop.
(Police siren) And she says, "No photographs, buddy.
This is a crime scene.
" And I said, "What are you talking about, lady? I said, "This is a street.
This is a public thoroughfare.
" She said, "I told you, no photography allowed.
" I mean, I thought, "Whoa! If there's no photographs, then there's no history.
" I thought, "Fuck them.
I'm gonna get in there and I'm gonna make these pictures.
"We need a record.
" Meyerowitz spent eight months on this site with a large format camera, photographing the aftermath, access that even television couldn't secure.
It was moving under my feet the entire time.
Shaking.
Could hardly use the tripod most of the times, it was so shaky.
Ask Jon Snow.
What I liked about Joel was that if you turned up there to meet him at Ground Zero, you had to, of course, pretend you were part of his staff.
He doesn't have any staff.
It was as if he was part of the operation.
He had this huge camera, huge old wooden and brass thing.
Wood and photographs? Do they still do that? Well, yes, at scenes of crime they do.
I photographed the entire thing in colour, because to photograph it in black-and-white would be to keep it as a tragedy.
Because there's a tragic element to photographing in this case not war, but the collapse, right? It was just destruction.
The incident was so immediate, and so catastrophic and on such a scale, that it was very, very difficult on the day to grasp the enormity of it.
It was only the aftermath, wandering through the rubble, that began to cut through that and you began just to think about the life that had gone on where you were standing.
You see, I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images.
I I have a suspicion that on our hard drive are a series within our brains of still photographs of very important moments in our lives, be they domestic or international, be they of the family, of birth, of death, but we think in terms of still images, and what the photographer is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened.
What happened at the ghetto in Lodz is, thanks to photography, now at least visibly clearer.
Henryk Ross's pictures certainly helped Helen Aronson come to terms with her own experiences.
When finally published, they also led her to another ghetto survivor, her first love.
And that's him as he is now.
He's 89.
And, of course, we just reminiscence how it used to be.
And this is me with him and the book.
Talking about photographs.
This is something very personal.
I have nothing from my childhood and so on, but the only thing that survived with me all the war were pictures of my sister.
They were the only things that I kept.
(Chuckles) Nothing else.
So when people ask me, "If you had to leave your home, "what is the most important things you would take?" Pictures.
(She chuckles) (Tuning radio) (Meyerowitz) If there's no photographs, then there's no history.
(Sam Stephenson) He really believed that there was a truth that he could find.
(Meyerowitz) So it's a game of pounce.
(Harold Feinstein) The reason he was crazy is he cared.
(Tony Vaccaro) God is with us.
(Philip Jones Griffiths) People believe pictures.
(Meyerowitz) "No photographs, buddy.
This is a crime scene.
" (Danto) "trusting the photograph"
In 1933, something was captured near here by artist and photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Armed with a revolutionary new camera, he shot a moment.
This moment.
It took only a fraction of a second to bag, but came to be known as "a decisive moment", now the most familiar concept in all of photography.
It's a strategy that has illuminated photography's potential for all of us.
In Germany that same year, Hitler's National Socialist Party enjoyed its own moment.
Within six years, the decisive moment and the historical moment would collide on the battlefields of Europe.
The result would be iconic images of war by legendary photojournalists like Robert Capa.
Photojournalism was born in the chaos of modern warfare.
But when the fighting finally stopped, the question remained of just how good photography had been at explaining what all the blood and suffering had been about.
(Danto) We thought that was the world.
Now we realise there were a lot of myths in that.
I mean, trusting the photograph was probably a huge mistake from the beginning.
This is Henri Cartier-Bresson, the godfather of photojournalism.
From the early 1930s, he prowled the streets, snapping moments, fleeting action that found its perfect expression and true meaning through the content and composition of the picture.
Bresson, a surrealist sympathiser, always maintained that he was first and foremost a painter, but his "decisive moments" transformed the face of photography.
(Meyerowitz) Bresson's pictures were about being in the right place at the right time.
He could step into a space and see the theatrical possibilities.
It might be at the top of a flight of stairs that wended their way down to the street below, and he had a sense, "If I hang out here, someone's gonna bike along.
" He understood that into this space life will come.
So it's a game of pounce.
Cartier-Bresson was a had been a big-game hunter.
He'd he'd gone shooting things and he was a stalker.
You had to wait for this animal to appear.
You stalked that animal, and at that moment you had to be ready to shoot.
Photographers pounce on this fraction of a second because there's a capacity to read all of this flux of of daily life, and see in it, in that tiny moment, some truth.
(Train chuffing) Bresson's photograph of a man jumping over a puddle in Paris is a classic example of a decisive moment, seemingly casual but charged with significance.
To some people it's a picture of a guy jumping over a puddle, but there there's that sort of generic European Jewish name on the poster.
There's the guy jumping into the unknown.
The broken hoop.
The first thing, probably, man ever made was a wheel, and this is a broken one.
And throughout history, people have referred to the broken hoop and the wheel that's cracked and so forth.
That must have been for hundreds of years the biggest thousands of years, probably the biggest disaster that could happen to anyone is have your wheel break.
He was the Nostradamus of the early '30s who predicted what was gonna happen to Europe in that one single image.
Europe jumping into the unknown.
And it's a great, great photograph for that reason.
The interesting thing about photography is that you know when you press that shutter whether that visual orgasm has occurred or not.
You sort of know it.
It it bypasses bits of the brain that and your eye.
You just know it.
The feeling you get when you look at it, which is that this guy has turned round and snapped, and caught a moment, that's not how it was.
And I think that that's a big fantasy that the photography world has suggested, is that people have just got this kind of God-given gift of capturing something.
(Oliver Chanarin) So many decisions have been made, in quite a measured way, up until the point that that picture was taken.
The photographer's decided where to be, they've decided once they're there where they're gonna take the picture from, what camera they're gonna use, what film they're gonna use.
They've made all these decisions.
That he'd waited for it? Yeah.
That doesn't mean to say that he said, "Here's 50 francs.
Jump over this puddle.
" Or "Can you bring a broken hoop in?" Nonsense.
Of course not.
He saw something.
He pushed the camera through a gap in the fence and got what I have personally described as "the greatest photograph of the 20th century".
(Danto) You've got to remember about Cartier-Bresson that he was a surrealist.
That was his milieu.
The the surrealists really did believe that there was a super-reality behind appearances, and occasionally it would reveal itself, and you'd just have to wait for that to happen.
- (Gasps) - (Shutter clicks) That's what makes me gasp, you know.
- (Shutter clicks) - I'm awake.
When the action enters the physical space, he knows how to time it so that it reaches its apogee - (Shutter clicks) at a point, and that's the decisive moment.
Bresson was only able to capture such moments because of a revolutionary development in camera technology.
The Leica, launched in Germany in 1925.
Compact, quiet, and with the latest lens technology, it gave birth to a whole new style of instant photography.
(Danto) He must have had one of the first Leicas.
There couldn't have been very many on the market.
He he was a rich boy.
He had enough money, at any rate, to have that.
And I think that was the moment, in in a way, that nobody ever would have anticipated.
It allows allows you to really be present in the moment and glide through the moment.
The thing about it is that the window is here so when you look through the camera this eye is open so that you can actually watch the world.
Most other single-lens reflex cameras go in front of your face so they block off the vision.
The Leica was the chosen tool of Hungarian-born photojournalist Robert Capa, who became famous for capturing the ultimate in decisive moments - (Shutter clicks) the death of a Spanish Civil War soldier cut down by a bullet in 1936.
When civil war became world war, in 1939, Capa brought fame, heroism and charisma to the war photographer.
Working for Life magazine, he maintained that the first rule of photojournalism was to get close and the second, to get closer.
It earned him a reputation as the world's greatest war photographer, and its first real celebrity.
I envied him because he was handsome and he attracted all the women.
And Capa was a superb journalist.
I always hesitated to call him a great photographer, but I called him a great journalist.
It was astounding, I think, to me as a young teenager, that a photographer could risk his life.
The idea that photography was that important was simply mind-boggling.
Ultimately what one wants to say is, "This picture, I believe it, "because of that name under it, or on the back of the print," because we know that he sticks to what photography's always been best at doing, which is capturing reality.
People believe pictures.
It's a photograph that's in your passport, not a painting.
Now, George Bernard Shaw said, "I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.
" That's what the power of photography is.
The power of a famous photojournalist like Capa was to be able to choose his battles, to drop in and out of the conflict.
In less glamorous circumstances, Tony Vaccaro photographed World War II, not on assignment but on a daily basis as an ordinary GI.
Tony had been a soldier in the war, and, of course, soldiers don't get recognition for their photo He had been a a soldier photographer, and he made perhaps the best pictures of World War II of any soldier photographer.
The camera was always on my neck, never on my shoulder.
On my neck.
And a gun always here.
And I could easily hold the gun and do this.
(Shutter clicks) (John Morris) It's strange that some photographers who deserve great recognition never achieve it.
My guess is that Tony was primarily a journalist even as a soldier.
And I think that's why his record of the war from a soldier's standpoint is so outstanding.
The regular soldier photographer was expected to record events with standard army equipment.
The issue camera was the Speed Graphic.
That's insane.
Here it is, the Speed Graphic.
You focus through there.
You can, er This has two pictures.
The film is placed underneath this.
You close this.
You see the accident? I pulled both out.
Then you look through here to take a picture.
Turn it over.
Meantime, bullets are going around.
See what things can happen.
Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
Thirty-two pictures.
35mm camera.
All we need is 36 here.
(Shutter clicks) Vaccaro's ambitions to be a photojournalist meant that he had to do better than the cumbersome Speed Graphic.
Unlike Capa, he couldn't afford a Leica and went to war with the more modest Argus C3.
(Vaccaro) I am compared with Robert Capa quite often, because he took a picture of a soldier dying in front of his camera, I took a picture of a soldier dying in front of my camera.
He maintained, and he got this from Hemingway, that war is romantic.
I'm sorry.
I said, "Bob, you are dead wrong.
" As a soldier, Vaccaro couldn't help but be close to the action.
Closer even than Capa.
When a German tank was bombed right in front of his eyes, it was photography, not survival, that he was thinking about.
I see the turret open, and came out this person.
He was fine, but soon as he opened the turret, he blew up.
Something happened that diesel went all over, and he's burning.
I heard his "Mutter, Mutter.
" "Mother, Mother," he was saying to himself.
Now I am down.
I felt that the picture should be taken a little higher.
And so I went on the tip of my toes, and as I am there and clicked, I hear bullets hitting the tank, on this side, "Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh!" And I dove and landed here with my head.
I stayed down and I look at him and I read what he has here for the first time, "Gott mit uns," "God is with us.
" 0n D-day, the greatest military operation in history, involving over one million men on the Allied side alone, Robert Capa was the only photojournalist who went with the first wave of troops onto 0maha Beach to capture nothing less than the very face of history in the making.
Everyone was waiting for pictures.
Life magazine was under extreme deadline pressure to publish.
But it was 48 hours before picture editor John Morris received Capa's exposed film.
So I asked the darkroom to rush development and there were four rolls of 35mm and Bob had written a note saying that all the action was in those four rolls and those were the the pictures he took as he'd landed.
And a few moments after I gave the command, if you want to call it that, this young hysterical darkroom boy came rushing into my office saying the films were all ruined, and I said "What happened?" And he said, "Well, you were in such a hurry, "I put the the four rolls in the drying cabinet and closed the doors," which was not normal procedure.
And there was too much heat and the emulsion ran.
So I ran back and found that there were three rolls were gone but on the fourth there were 11 frames and those are the ones that, fortunately, survived.
These are perhaps the most famous of all war images, pictures that say as much about the challenge of being in the right place at the right time with a camera as they do about the experience of fighting for your country and for your life.
Without the luxury of a magazine back home waiting to process his vulnerable film, Tony Vaccaro decided to develop it himself on the battlefield in soldiers' helmets.
But he needed the right chemicals.
(Tony Vaccaro) One day, I went into a town called Saint-Denis, and I found the ruins of a camera store.
I look in I start removing rocks, and there it is, you know? The chemicals.
I'm standing in a foxhole, and I put the chemical in the first helmet, water in the next, hypo in the third and water in the fourth helmet.
And a moonless night.
June of 1944.
And I remove the film from the cassette and I start my first roll, you know, going like this.
And I had one of those timers that I could see at night, you know.
I would check 11 minutes.
And at 11 minutes I shake it a little, went into the water a couple of turns, then into the hypo for five minutes.
I check the time, and then, er shake it a little.
And into the water.
Change the water a couple of times.
That was it.
And I'd hang the film, the negatives now, on the branches of the nearest tree.
And next morning And I went to sleep and the thing is there.
(Chuckles) So I went to sleep.
I woke up.
I look.
Perfect.
But the ten rolls Vaccaro developed that night were destroyed by the army censor.
They contained images of dead Gls, decisive moments the world wasn't yet ready to accept.
After the war, Capa went to Hollywood to take pictures on the set of Hitchcock's film Notorious.
Tony Vaccaro stayed in Germany, photographing its occupation and reconstruction.
What had photography really done for our understanding of events in World War II? It had captured important moments, many of which were close up and personal.
It seemed good at effects but bad at causes.
It suggested that history is about more than meets the eye.
There is so much more to the things that we think we know from afar, that the closer you get to it, the more complex it is, not the simpler it is to understand.
When you're photographing anything to do with war and conflict, you're photographing something impossible, you're photographing a Everything you do is just clumsy and stupid and half-witted, because it's impossible to to portray the full width and breadth of the things that you're up against.
It's kind of like from a the difference of maybe looking at a mosaic from afar where you have a myriad of pieces that give you a sense of an image, and then the closer you get to it, it starts to pixelate and fall apart, but you really have to stand far back, and the closer you get, the less sure you are of how well these little pieces fit together.
(Narrator) Photography had already shown that there was an alternative to being in the right place at the right time.
This is Roger Fenton's picture, called The Valley 0f The Shadow 0f Death, taken in 1885, a year after The Charge 0f The Light Brigade.
Cannonballs were all he had to play with but it says as much about the nature of war as any image from the front line.
That's a picture that has no dead bodies in it, no exploded buildings, but it's a powerful picture in terms of what was the experience like to have been in that place at that time, to have saddled on and clippety-clopped "half a league, half a league onward" through that hail of cannonballs.
And yet the picture doesn't have any of those things in it, apart from just this detritus of cannonballs.
It draws you in and says, "Imagine what it would be like for you to run through this place.
" The history of photography is littered with images taken long after the event, pictures that still speak eloquently about what had already happened.
This is a photograph of a bullet-torn, bloodstained shirt, the one worn by the Archduke Maximilian when he faced a Mexican firing squad.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, photography's task became horribly simple, to provide undeniable historical proof of Nazi atrocities, documenting crime scenes of unimaginable proportions.
But after the war, the tangled relationship between photography and historical truth would become apparent even in a calamity as black-and-white as the Holocaust.
(Ringing) This is Lodz in Poland, the site of an infamous Nazi ghetto.
It was here that Henryk Ross, along with 164,000 other Polish Jews, was incarcerated for four years until the ghetto was liquidated in 1944.
But Ross was a photographer, and he kept a unique record of what really happened here.
The Nazis had put the running and policing of the ghetto in Jewish hands, a situation that created a system of privilege among its inhabitants.
There were those who had the merest chance of survival and those who had none.
Among his many duties as one of the ghetto's official photographers, Ross had to document the production of goods by the inhabitants of Lodz, sold to make money for their captors.
Ross was a propaganda photographer at one level.
I mean, he was employed by the Department of Administration and Statistics.
He produced identity card pictures.
He worked within the graphics department that had the responsibility for promoting the goods that were made in the ghetto and which many people would would view as a form of collaboration.
This building was the Department of Administration and Statistics, where Ross worked.
Although he had become a propaganda photographer for his German jailers, he was a photojournalist before the war.
Simply by looking out of his office window here, he could see that life for the Jews was becoming progressively worse.
He decided to document it.
We're in the apartment of some people whose breakfast we've interrupted.
So this is where the the bridge was over the main street.
This is Zgierska Street, part of the main thoroughfare of Lodz, which was known here as Aryan Street.
And initially when I think when the ghetto was set up, Jews could cross at leisure, but gradually restrictions came in and and the bridge was built and at the point that Jews couldn't walk on the street at all.
Lodz wasn't a death camp but it was a staging post.
Most of its inhabitants were eventually deported from here on trains, never to be seen again.
The early deportations were to Chelmno, which is in that direction.
That was the death camp that the the Nazis initially set up.
And as they perfected their methods at Auschwitz, which is in that direction, that's where the majority of the Jews of Lodz were ultimately sent.
Part of the way Ross saw his role, his responsibility, even, as a photographer, was to document what was happening here and he was able one night to smuggle himself in, spent the night in the building to the side here, documenting one of the deportations, as German troops herded people onto these carriages or carriages like them.
He almost certainly would have been killed, as as would his family, had he been caught.
(Birdsong) This is what remains of the hospital in Lodz Ghetto, where Ross photographed Jewish police preventing the sick and elderly from escaping, knowing that they were being rounded up for deportation.
(Chris Boot) Ross obviously enjoyed free movement within the police.
I mean, the Jewish police had no problem with him, and it doesn't look from the pictures like they had a problem with him photographing them.
So I don't think he was taking the same degree of risk as he was down at the railway station while people were being deported on trains.
This was him trying to use his camera as a vehicle for recording these important moments.
I mean, the other pictures that he took that he was clear that he was risking his life taking was of the hangings in the ghetto square.
Before the liquidation of the ghetto, Ross buried all his negatives in this garden, hoping they might survive even if he didn't.
Amazingly, both he and the negatives did, and in 1961 his most incriminating pictures helped hang war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
But there were other photographs Ross had taken that had no place in the courtroom and until recently no place in our image of the Holocaust.
As well as his other pictures, Ross had, in an unselfconscious way, photographed the everyday life of the ghetto, including marriages, religious ceremonies, and parties.
In these pictures we see a happy, well-fed Jewish elite and scenes that show some uncomfortable truths about the ghetto system, like a little boy dressed up as a Lodz policeman in his own ghetto-made uniform, playing a game of "arrest your best playmate".
The battle over this material is partly the argument partly rests in the argument that nobody there was no joy in the ghetto, and these pictures certainly do challenge that.
Contrary to any thought that they might complicate the picture of German cruelty, or any question about the extent of the Holocaust, they actually give a very, very clear idea of how the German war machine in that period managed the Holocaust.
There's something very immediate about photography.
There's something very powerful about these pictures.
You can't look at these pictures without knowing that everyone or almost everyone in them was killed before the war was over.
Photo-historian Chris Boot recently published a more representative selection of Ross's images as well as organising public events to discuss the pictures.
Anyone who had survived the ghetto might now see them for the first time.
I was sitting with my daughter and we started seeing these photographs, and suddenly I said, "Oh, I knew this person.
" Another photograph appeared.
I said, "I knew this person.
" And we come to the last photograph, and I looked at this photograph and I said, "I knew this person very well, "this man playing the accordion was my boyfriend, my first love, "and and in the camp.
" And suddenly my daughter, who sat next to me, said to me, "But, Mummy, you are next to him.
" Well, I was just I was laughing, crying, I I just didn't know how to react.
It it was amazing.
Amazing feeling.
No, there were fun times.
There were concerts.
There were theatres, Jewish theatres.
There were hairdressers, there were It was a little Jewish state.
And hunger, yes.
You you eat pieces from the wall.
You eat any anything.
And and for many years, I didn't want to think about it.
- (Man) Are you glad to see those pictures? - Yes, absolutely.
Yes.
(Man) More than you're upset by them? More than I'm sad, yes.
I'm I'm very pleased to see them.
In Japan, the photographic legacy of World War II proved to be even more indecisive and tangled than in the victorious West.
The physical impact of the war here had been so different that even the simple act of conveying its horrors wasn't easy.
(John Dower) These cities were so crowded and the construction was so flimsy that they dropped almost 100% incendiaries and just burned out the cities.
There is no really stunning photography of Japan after the war comparable to the photography of German cities because the German cities always have those masonry and church steeples rising to the sky.
There were still things standing.
But here everything is flat burned out.
There aren't even any bomb craters, and so it's very difficult to photograph.
In two of the most decisive moments in history, August 6th and August 9th 1945, the Americans detonated atomic bombs above the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Two flashes killed over 200,000 Japanese in an instant.
The American military's photographic records of what remained are extensive.
But unlike photographic records of the Holocaust, their pictures completely ignored any evidence of human suffering.
They were interested in physical damage, because their task was to measure, "What is the effect of the bomb 100 metres, 200 metres, "1,000 metres, 8,000 metres from the epicentre?" What the Americans turn their cameras away from is the human victims.
This is a surviving copy of the very magazine that finally delivered photographic evidence of the human cost to the Japanese, seven years after the event.
Japanese photographers had begun taking pictures within hours of the blasts but their images were confiscated by the Americans and suppressed until the end of their occupation.
Jostling for position next to ads featuring Grace Kelly lookalikes, these are the images that helped Japan begin to view itself not only as the aggressor but also the victim.
But pictures like these were still nowhere to be seen when photography made its most public statement on behalf of humanity only three years later.
Photography's big response to a world rapidly moving from hot to cold war was this.
The Family 0f Man, an exhibition that opened in New York in 1955, comprised of over 500 images, from 273 photographers both amateur and professional.
It was selected from literally millions of images.
Five travelling versions toured the world, netting nine million visitors by 1964.
Staged as a walk-through version of Life magazine, it would be the most popular photographic show of all time, photography's biggest moment.
(David Campany) We'd had 20 or so years of mass-media magazines.
It's just at the dawning of television.
So in many ways it's a last statement about photography as the defining mass medium of the age.
That statement is still standing over 50 years later inside this fairytale-like castle in Clervaux, Luxembourg.
The exact same prints, carefully orchestrated to preach the exact same humanistic message, "We're all the same underneath", can still be seen in all its timeless naive wonder.
0r you can buy the book, which has never been out of print.
There is a sense of the audience for the show being encouraged into a kind of dream state, something rather removed, actually, from social realities.
Although the pictures all come from social realities, they're brought together to make this slightly abstract tone poem about what it is to be human.
We all live, we all die, we all laugh, we all cry, sometimes we go to war, avoids the real historical and political and economic and ideological factors that affect everybody's lives, and prevents them from being a family of man.
The show was a sticking plaster for the wounds of war.
But it represented everything photojournalism's deity Henri Cartier-Bresson stood for.
He had several images in the exhibition.
But the younger generation of photographers like Robert Frank were against having their pictures used to prop up nothing more than well-intentioned propaganda.
(David Campany) What the show suppresses, if you like, is the individual view of the photographer.
You'd get the impression, going around the show, that all the photographers felt the same, that the photographers were themselves a family of man, and this is just not true.
The exhibition still concludes with an optimistic cliché, W Eugene Smith's photograph of his own children walking in his own garden out into the light, the beginning of their sentimental journey through life.
Smith embraced the show's humanistic message, but the very year it opened, he proved in dramatic fashion that he was firmly outside any photographic family.
In 1947, top photojournalists Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour, had created the photo agency Magnum.
Formed as a cooperative, it declared that its photographers would retain their negatives and copyright in their pictures.
Smith would join them later and drag an infant Magnum to near bankruptcy.
But for now he was a star turn at Life magazine.
I first worked with James Smith, uh I think it was in October 1939.
I was just a young reporter on the Life magazine staff.
He wanted to photograph war the way it was.
He he made pictures which are you know, in some ways more damning of war than Robert Capa's pictures.
I mean, he he made a sea of corpses.
He refused to let Life touch his negatives, uh if he could help it.
I remember Ed Thompson, the managing editor, saying to me once, "If you want to put Smith on that story, you you do it.
"I don't want anything to do with him.
" Anyway, Smith was the most difficult man I ever knew.
(Chuckles) Smith became America's greatest photo essayist.
But his increasingly obsessive pursuit of the story caused Life magazine problems.
For the assignment "Country Doctor", he stalked his subject for 23 days, ignoring demands from his employers that he return.
In 1955, he quit Life, joined Magnum, and came here to Pittsburgh for his first routine independent assignment, to produce 100 photographs in three weeks to celebrate the city's centenary.
But Smith's real plan was much more ambitious.
Three weeks turned into a three-year commitment, as he attempted to describe, understand, and better the world he saw around him, with no less than 21,000 photographic moments.
(Sam Stephenson) Eugene Smith loved William Faulkner, and he had clips of William Faulkner's quotes all over his loft.
And one of the quotes was about Thomas Wolfe, the writer.
William Faulkner said that Wolfe was trying to put the entire history of the human heart on the head of a pin.
And I think that's what Smith was trying to do with his photography.
He really thought that when he finished his Pittsburgh project, people were gonna look at it and change their behaviour.
You know, culture was gonna be changed by what he was showing.
When he came here to Pittsburgh, he saw nature, this extraordinary geographic environment here, the natural environment, and the heaviest industry America ever had, and immigrants from all over Europe were here.
There was destruction and construction.
There was wealth and poverty.
There was these beautiful rivers and it all just came together into this one bundle here in Pittsburgh.
He was ready to erupt with a massive photographic project and I really believe that it would have happened no matter where he'd gone, because he quit Life magazine in January of 1955, and his mother died in February of 1955.
His relationship with his mother was was deep and complex.
She was domineering and she was always telling him how bad he was doing, and how, you know, even when he was world famous, she would write him letters and say, "Gene, when are you gonna wake up and do something worthwhile?" (Dog barking) Smith never "woke up", perhaps because he rarely ever went to sleep, which was hard on his photographic assistants.
(Harold Feinstein) I'd be working till three in the morning, and flop out, and, uh the next morning at ten he's still working.
But he used to use amphetamines.
We didn't know that word then.
It was called Dexedrine, which even my sisters used to use to lose weight.
I I never thought of it as speed.
Smith took amphetamines constantly, like like dozens of pills every day.
They were for the purpose of keeping him awake, so he could accomplish more work.
He was addicted to his work, and in his life there's not a lot of evidence that he did much else besides work.
But he was also addicted to alcohol, and he would go in these cycles of up and down, and Harold told me that, uh He was joking but he said they used to drink ferrous cyanide, acid that they used to bleach their prints to increase the contrast between light and dark colours, and Harold said they used to drink the stuff.
With the original assignment long lost, Smith now began draining Magnum's meagre coffers.
Spiralling into bankruptcy and professional suicide, he eventually chose 2,000 core images of Pittsburgh selected from 7,000 prints that had been painstakingly crafted.
(Harold Feinstein) I always sensed the demon was his mother.
But the problem the reason he was crazy is he cared.
I was a master printer at the time so I could do some of his printing, and his printing was extraordinary.
He had a sense of of darkening and lightening.
He used to use ferrous cyanide, which could accentuate the lighting in certain areas of the print.
He cared about the details.
He cared about the whole thing.
At that point, the photographer was someone you sent out to point a camera to take a picture of that and that and that.
W Eugene Smith's photo essay of Pittsburgh was never sold.
His magnum opus ended up pinned to bulletin boards all around his loft.
The world he wanted to change never saw it.
I was unpublishable.
It really was.
It was unpublishable from the start.
And there was no way to publish 2,000 photographs in a book.
There was no way to exhibit them anywhere.
That's one of the mysteries of this story of Smith and why did he care so much about his work.
And I think it's the same question you ask about, you know, prophets, Old Testament prophets.
Why did they care so much? And Smith certainly saw himself in that light.
I mean, he really believed that there was a truth that he could find, and I don't think that people believe that today.
Smith's Pittsburgh project suggested that decisive moments, even in their thousands, were not enough to get to the bottom of the American postwar experience.
For Japanese photographers, the legacy of the past and the political complexities of the present were even harder to unravel.
America had continued to use the Pacific as a nuclear test site throughout the early '50s and the Japanese had once again suffered casualties.
As part of a growing anti-nuclear movement in Japan, in the early '60s photographers returned to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the first time since 1945.
Tomatsu went down to Nagasaki and did some of the really, really iconic photographs that we now associate with Nagasaki.
Shomei Tomatsu has become one of Japan's greatest photographers.
But in 1961 he was just a kid on an assignment.
Sixteen years after the event, there would be no D-day photo opportunity in Nagasaki and no place for a traditional war photographer.
(Tomatsu speaks Japanese) (Translator) I saw for the first time how these people had been living for 16 years.
Over that time, Nagasaki had turned into an exotic place, like Naples.
And for the most part, there was no evidence of what had happened.
Bomb victims found it embarrassing to go out in public, so they didn't go out much at all, and a lot of them would avoid any form of eye contact with other people.
Even after 16 years, those around them, especially children, didn't know they were bomb victims.
When they got on the buses, for example, children would shout, "There's a ghost!" Even though they were all living together, these people were forgotten in their own communities.
The culture shock was so great, I couldn't process my feelings while I was working.
Later, when it wasn't my job any more, for many years I went back.
And every time I returned, I got to know the people I photographed even more.
Tomatsu didn't only photograph those who carried the terrible and psychological effects of the blast, but other kinds of scars.
(John Dower) Shattered Christian statues, broken statues that had been blackened and charred, very powerful.
(Watch ticking) A very simple item suddenly becomes awesome, like a pocket watch that suddenly stopped at the time the bomb fell.
(Stops ticking) Or a bottle that has been twisted into some almost like a grotesque deformed human foetus, you know, and it's the notion that the world we cherish, which is a world of ordinary objects, and everyday things, no longer exists.
Tomatsu's images are, in some respects, a return to The Valley 0f The Shadow 0f Death.
They question the very necessity to be present during the action, a red rag to the classic war photographer.
The great thing about photography is, unlike almost all the other art forms, is to practise, you have to be there.
And as the great master Cartier-Bresson says, as you discover the external world, you discover more about the internal world, and it's an upward spiral, and in the end you become eloquent at telling and seeing and understanding, and your pictures are great for that reason.
Given the choice, you're always there before it happens.
Next choice is when it happens and third choice is when it's all over.
And the problem often is that once the circus has left town, it's a pretty boring town.
I think the days of that kind of classic photojournalist, you know, the kind of testosterone-driven, main kind of macho guy, out at the front line, is over.
Watching somebody, you know, falling backwards, dying from a bullet, what is that telling us? You know, we kind of learn to accept this notion that war is inevitable and these are kind of ritual punctuations that we're gonna see every day when we open up the newspaper.
Photographs have become important in a different way.
The medium has, by its nature, become a more reflective look at things.
Generally, photographers arrive in places after the event now, rather than at the event.
During a real event, you have TV crews up at the front.
Then the photographers come in and make something more more of an analysis, perhaps.
This is a good example of how we would approach the theme or the subject of suicide, a suicide bomb, rather than showing blood, blood, pools of blood on the street minutes after it's happened.
I think there's something more sinister and more unnerving about these images, which are recreations of real suicide bombs that Palestinians have built, and disguised as as everyday objects, as a watermelon, you can see.
Broomberg and Chanarin's photographs are, like the image of a stopped watch or a twisted bottle, pictures of the relics of war.
Photographs of seemingly innocent, everyday objects made chilling by what they speak of, not what they show.
(Birdsong) But what happens when warfare becomes invisible? The 0uter Hebrides.
No bullets flying.
No bombs exploding.
Modern conflict at its most covert.
A challenge for photographer Simon Norfolk.
These waters off the coast of these islands, between the Outer Hebrides and Scotland, are the largest submarine exercise area in Europe.
This airspace is the biggest low-flying training zone in Europe.
This island here has the biggest I think it's the biggest in the world, testing range where you can fire missiles.
The fact that you can't see the troposphere, you can't see the submarines, and you can't see the ionosphere, and you can't see the radar systems, I think just makes it more interesting to me, really.
I wanted to talk about this particular submarine exercise area.
The light was gorgeous.
I found that the colour was great.
And the presence of the salmon nets in the water is slightly odd, strange, slightly surreal.
And also politically very interesting, because I was looking at the right thing.
So it felt like several units just started to stack up.
So you you get a feeling about things.
All the interesting stuff that happens in war is happening in these spheres.
The money is not being built on spending a new battle tank.
Moving men around in little metal boxes round a desert is totally 1980s.
Heroism's changed.
War has changed.
But photojournalism is still stuck in the 1940s.
My argument is that even if not a single picture is ever published, they exist, and that means that we are recording the history of the human race.
If that's all you're doing, it's still a very, very worthwhile profession to be involved in.
Whatever the arguments about photography and how it deals with history, when you are in the right place at the right time, it's a question of shoot first and ask questions later.
This is Ground Zero in New York.
Today, anyone can take their own pictures of where the Twin Towers once stood.
But on the day, photographer Joel Meyerowitz discovered this wasn't so easy.
(Meyerowitz) I did something I've done my entire life.
I picked up my Leica.
And as I put it to my eye, someone behind me punched me on my shoulder.
I turn around and it's a black woman cop.
(Police siren) And she says, "No photographs, buddy.
This is a crime scene.
" And I said, "What are you talking about, lady? I said, "This is a street.
This is a public thoroughfare.
" She said, "I told you, no photography allowed.
" I mean, I thought, "Whoa! If there's no photographs, then there's no history.
" I thought, "Fuck them.
I'm gonna get in there and I'm gonna make these pictures.
"We need a record.
" Meyerowitz spent eight months on this site with a large format camera, photographing the aftermath, access that even television couldn't secure.
It was moving under my feet the entire time.
Shaking.
Could hardly use the tripod most of the times, it was so shaky.
Ask Jon Snow.
What I liked about Joel was that if you turned up there to meet him at Ground Zero, you had to, of course, pretend you were part of his staff.
He doesn't have any staff.
It was as if he was part of the operation.
He had this huge camera, huge old wooden and brass thing.
Wood and photographs? Do they still do that? Well, yes, at scenes of crime they do.
I photographed the entire thing in colour, because to photograph it in black-and-white would be to keep it as a tragedy.
Because there's a tragic element to photographing in this case not war, but the collapse, right? It was just destruction.
The incident was so immediate, and so catastrophic and on such a scale, that it was very, very difficult on the day to grasp the enormity of it.
It was only the aftermath, wandering through the rubble, that began to cut through that and you began just to think about the life that had gone on where you were standing.
You see, I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images.
I I have a suspicion that on our hard drive are a series within our brains of still photographs of very important moments in our lives, be they domestic or international, be they of the family, of birth, of death, but we think in terms of still images, and what the photographer is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened.
What happened at the ghetto in Lodz is, thanks to photography, now at least visibly clearer.
Henryk Ross's pictures certainly helped Helen Aronson come to terms with her own experiences.
When finally published, they also led her to another ghetto survivor, her first love.
And that's him as he is now.
He's 89.
And, of course, we just reminiscence how it used to be.
And this is me with him and the book.
Talking about photographs.
This is something very personal.
I have nothing from my childhood and so on, but the only thing that survived with me all the war were pictures of my sister.
They were the only things that I kept.
(Chuckles) Nothing else.
So when people ask me, "If you had to leave your home, "what is the most important things you would take?" Pictures.
(She chuckles) (Tuning radio) (Meyerowitz) If there's no photographs, then there's no history.
(Sam Stephenson) He really believed that there was a truth that he could find.
(Meyerowitz) So it's a game of pounce.
(Harold Feinstein) The reason he was crazy is he cared.
(Tony Vaccaro) God is with us.
(Philip Jones Griffiths) People believe pictures.
(Meyerowitz) "No photographs, buddy.
This is a crime scene.
" (Danto) "trusting the photograph"