The Photographic Archive of the Twentieth Century

We love a photograph. We lean our loved ones on our dressers, we stick our children to our refrigerators and in war we die with our dearest clutched in our hand. Our photographs, over time, became proxies for our memories and, with age, our photographs and our memories blend into one, our pasts often lie rubber banded together in a drawer, waiting to be re-lived.

Since the 1820s men and women have been placing a rectangle around what they see, leaving a trail of anthropological gold. When I think of photographs that hold true resonance with me and stand the test of time, my mind drifts over the limitless images that have been recorded. The unifying theme is always the photographer’s desire to create, to record, to stop time and to remember. 

Bill Eggelston’ photograph of the red ceiling (Greenwood Mississippi) from 1973 stands out because of its beauty, but it is more importantly a record of banality. He chose to capture a detail that would have escaped photographers before his time. His ability to see a culmination of all of our history a second before it became our past was his gift. His anthropological record has a great impact on the legacy of photography but to find a photograph that moved the needle of culture, to isolate a choice to push the shutter that changed history was possibly a more noble choice.

The world-famous photograph of Emmett Till, captured in 1955, when Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley chose to have her 14 year old son’s battered body photographed in an open casket, was a photo that changed the world. This photograph was printed to black publications all over the country and was credited for triggering the civil rights movement. This photograph by David Jackson, a black photographer, was a photographic watershed moment. These two rolls of film, undoubtedly hard to take, are a testament to the need for some people to stop time and to share what they see. Although photographs were the undoing of the American support for Viet Nam, and used to expose the brutality of the Nazi death machine, the Emmett Till photographs could have never been taken and world events might have taken a different turn. 

Photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig) has a stunning series of photographs documenting 1930s and 1940s New York. Weegee’s work explored a version of the city that would have passed unrecorded without him. Weegee would show up at a crime scene. The dead body would be laying on the sidewalk, the victim’s face often covered by a hat. Weegee would kneel next to the dead man and turn his camera on the crowd of onlookers. Children, mothers, men; in all states of wonder and amusement. This was his gift, to see the unrecorded. He shot a particularly beautiful series of movie theaters. He would take his Crown Graphic with his bright flash and slip into theaters in Times Square. He would squint into the darkness until he saw a couple kissing. He would turn the camera and the flash would explode and the moment that was secret, unseen, unrecorded would burn into his retina and into his film. Quickly the darkness would return. He was compelled to pick his camera up and to push the button. This simple act helped us to know ourselves better. 

The power to document these anthropologically visual moments would not exist without the invention of the camera itself. Like the Kinsey Report in 1948 (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female), that shaped our view of our own sex life, the photograph, our picture of ourselves, became a mirror, to feedback ourselves to ourselves. 

The Brownie camera, released in the first decade of the twentieth century allowed us to see ourselves and our fellow Americans in a way that was impossible before. Until then, photographs were precious and were made to record special events and important people. With the introduction of the brownie, every person could be captured laughing and dancing, showing off and hiding, standing with family or naked in the living room. 

We began a vernacular record of a century. Each photo contains material culture artifacts that can be examined in situ. It is the library of Alexandra in photographs. The Brownie gave way to the 120, to the 35, to the 110, to the disc camera, to the disposable to the digital. Each camera leaving its distinctive visual mark on our memories. Warm grain of the 1980s seems to even color our memories. 

Anyone living through the late part of the twentieth century may have hundreds of beautiful rectangular prints, their plastic pebbled surface distorting the soft faces of our past. They even have a smell that wafts up when you open the box like a crypt opened by the prying fingers of an anthropologist. We have made our own museum to the 36,500 days of the twentieth century. 

Today, we create more photographs in a day than we created in all of history. Each day five billion are taken. We are awash in rectangles and squares and banners. We art direct them, we curate them, send them and we store them, but, if you ask a parent of a five year old to hold a photograph of their child they will search every drawer to find a tiny stack of prints. 

Our twentieth century photo museum and our collection of material cultural artifacts have died off. Our phones, like our minds, are saturated and satiated with ease. Our desire to create is so easily satisfied that we miss something that is lost and what is lost will stay lost.