The Flavor of the Times

                                                         ALEXANDER GARDNER = President Lincoln and General McClellan at Antietam 1862

                                                                                      JACQUES-HENRI LARTIGUE = Paris, Avenue des Acacias 1912

                                              MARGARET BOURKE WHITE = Kentucky1937

BOB LANDRY = the us 28th division marching down the champs-elysees 1944

A Moment Preserved

                                                 ALFRED STIEGLITZ:The Terminal, 1893

In the hands of a perceptive person, the camera possesses a unique power: It is a matchless recorder of moments, of people and of place; it can reproduce the past with a fidelity no other medium can match. The classic photograph at right by Alfred Stieglitz demonstrates this power. For even the most casual viewer, the picture revives at once the look and feel of life in lower Manhattan during the 1890s. For a moment we are made part of a world of horse-drawn streetcars, antique streetlamps and gentlemen in bowler hats-a world that time and change have now erased in al­most every detail. Not only does the ge­nius of Stieglitz permit us a glimpse of the dress, architecture and city transit of a departed era, but it enables us to share a precise and personal moment in the photographer's own life.

Stieglitz made the picture during his first lonely months back in New York af­ter nine years of living and studying abroad. He later recalled the circumstances: "There was snow on the ground. A driver in a rubber coat was watering his steaming horses. There seemed to be something closely relat­ed to my deepest feeling in what I saw, and I decided to photograph what was within me. The steaming horses, and their driver watering them on a cold winter day; my feeling of aloneness in my own country, amongst my own peo­ple .... " Today all these things still are contained in a moment marvellous­ly preserved three quarters of a century ago.

Like the Stieglitz print, every photo­graph ever made freezes an image of something as it appeared at one instant in time. The pictures on the following pages demonstrate the power of the photograph to capture such fleeting moments-fragments of history, human faces and emotions, the look of an in­dustrial town in New Jersey or a lonely hotel room in Maine-and to retain them virtually forever. 

About This Series

There is a paradox in photography. It seems an artless art-point the cam­era, press the button and you have a picture (in a minute, if you like). A child can do it. And yet photography is also a distinctive, uniquely modern medium of expression acknowledged as art. Peo­ple take pictures at all levels, from the child's to the artist's, and this series of books is planned to serve everyone who uses a camera-whether to record family activities, to pursue a serious hobby, to advance a profession or to communicate an inner vision. The LIFE Library of Photography assumes no previous knowledge of photography, no familiarity with technical terminology. But it concerns itself not merely with the elementary, but also with the new­est developments in photographic sci­ence and the foremost expressions of photographic art.

To meet the needs of the beginner as well as the advanced photographer, each of the volumes is multi-layered. Each begins at the beginning, with fun­damentals. This book, for example, starts with the basic parts of a camera and the relative merits of different types, and goes on to explain the sci­entific underpinnings of photography -why some lenses focus sharply over a wider range of distances than others, why distortion occurs with one type of shutter and not with another-for tech­nical understanding helps a photogra­pher get the most from equipment and processes. Each book offers directly useful instruction-how to catch the natural expressions of children, tech­niques of high-speed photography, darkroom processing methods step-by­step. And each contains tables and charts listing and interpreting data on

films, developers, lenses, cameras and other materials.

The volumes are layered in another

. way as well. We feel that history and es­thetics can be made to bear strongly on the actual taking of pictures at all levels of competence. Therefore there is a mixture of these elements with practi­cal and technical matters in every book of this series. We aim to expose the reader to as much good photography as possible-and as much interesting information about the evolution of pho­tography-while telling him all we can about how to make pictures. It is our hope that this enriching process, as it continues from book to book, will make better photographers of the readers of the LIFE Library of Photography and deepen their appreciation of the sub­ject, whether they approach it as a hobby, as a profession or as an art. 

The Many Levels of Photography

Photography is a magic act-a little black box that can trap people and wild animals, strange places and well-loved ones, and bring them all back home. It is a trick that never ceases to delight the audience, the magician most of all. After seeing it done for the first time in 1839, the English chemist and as­tronomer Sir John Herschel could barely believe his eyes. "It is a miracle," hesaid.

Photography is indeed a miracle, an invention that allows us to make in­stant images of anything we see. It has become the peculiar art form of our technological age-fast, accurate, largely automatic; an efficient and pow­erful way of communicating information; an unmatched way of spanning time and space. No medium of expression has ever appeared so immediately to so many people, nor has any medium but spoken language been so uni­versally used. It was first embraced by artists and entrepreneurs as a means of making portraits more than a century ago, but it quickly broadened to pro­vide new miracles: views of foreign lands, glimpses of great wars and beau­tiful women-and countless snapshots of Sunday at the beach.

Today we live in a world in which photography is so commonplace we rarely give it a second thought. Yet as individuals we are not only daily con­sumers of vast numbers of pictures, but prolific producers as well. In the United States alone amateurs take more than four billion photographs every year; they own some 60 million cameras (plus 8 million movie cameras) and buy nearly 15 million new ones annually. Picture taking has been made so sophisticated-and at the same time so easy-that even a ten-year-old can pop a cartridge of "instant-loading" film into the back of a camera and snap away with reasonable success. On more and more cameras the controls are so automatic and reliable that sharp, properly exposed pictures are almost guaranteed. Even the processing of film has been short-cut in the Polaroid Land cameras which are designed to produce a full-color print a moment after the picture is taken-and sound a buzzer when it's ready. And for the more advanced photographer the market offers an ever-expanding array of cameras, lenses, accessories and films that allows him to search out and capture the most exotic subjects and effects.

Most people ask no more of a camera than that it preserve the treasured moments of their lives: the expressions of children, the look of a new house; graduations, marriages, family reunions; the trip to the Grand Canyon or Mexico or France. Some of the pictures may be fuzzy, the Eiffel Tower may seem to stick out of Father's head; yet every time the album or slide pro­jector is brought from the closet, the moments miraculously live again.

They live much more enjoyably for those who devote even a little attention to the equipment and techniques of photography. Its magic is not arcane. As the succeeding chapters in this book show, cameras and lenses, for all their technological gleam, operate on logical, and essentially simple, principles. The application of these principles over the years has led to the develop­ment of a variety of ingenious equipment-and more important, to an in­structive variety of ways of taking pictures.

Photography is an art that can be pursued at many levels, each offering its own rewards. Sometimes, moreover, the rewards are at first unsuspected; many of the greatest photographers got started by accident. Among the LIFE photographers, for example, Gordon Parks had been a busboy, a piano play­er and a professional basketball player before he bought his first camera in a Seattle pawnshop; Eliot Elisofon was a clerk in the New York State Work­men's Compensation Bureau; Dmitri Kessel was a cavalry officer in the Red Army; Alfred Eisenstaedt was a wholesale belt and button salesman when he sold his first photograph to a newspaper.

The careers of five photographers in particular are illuminating: Each was introduced to serious photography in a different fashion, each became a world-famous artist while preserving the unquenchable enthusiasm of the amateur, each mastered different facets of the craft.

The first of these is Jacques-Henri Lartigue, a Frenchman who all his life has taken a rare delight in recording the people and things that have passed before his eyes, and doing it with great skill. At the age of seven he tried out his first camera, a wooden box on a tripod so tall he had to climb up on a stool to look at its viewing screen; pictures were taken by re­moving a cork that covered the lens, counting the proper number of seconds and then replacing the cork. After trying it out for the first time the boy wrote to a friend: "It's marvelous, marvelous! Nothing will ever be as much fun. I'm going to photograph everything, everything!"

And that is just what Lartigue did. With this heavy instrument, and with smaller cameras he owned later, he took pictures of his family and friends, of portly gentlemen in linen suits strolling along the beach, of ladies in big flop­py hats, of the automobiles that were just beginning to stutter along the streets of Paris, of the flimsy airplanes that were struggling into the air. Over the years he accumulated an extraordinary record-he still keeps some 40,000 negatives on file-not only of his own life but of a whole era in the midst of exciting change. Photography stirred deep feelings in Lartigue. "Picture taking," he once said, "is a trap of images-serious, fleeting, funny, tragic, fanciful, rare, human, irreplaceable." Every family album, to some de­gree, or other, reaffirms his words.

Lartigue transformed into an art the very first level of photography, the re­cording of homely scenes of everyday life. Quite a different level was achieved by Crawford Greenewalt, president of the Du Pont company in Wilmington, Delaware. Greenewalt was an enthusiastic amateur photographer and on a summer afternoon not too many years ago, he tried to take a picture of a ruby-throated hummingbird to add to his collection of photographs of Delaware birds. It was a tricky matter to catch the little bird on film, for its wings beat the air dozens of times a second as it darted about near the bird­feeder outside his window. The picture turned out fairly well, but Greenewalt was determined to do still better and began to experiment with various kinds of equipment. After some puttering around, he worked out an arrangement ota small but versatile camera, a Hasselblad, and three electronic flashes whose rapid bursts of light were triggered when the tiny birds flew through the beam of a photoelectric cell. With this rig he photographed his fill of hum­mingbirds near home, then began taking his vacations all over North and South America in search of other species, carrying his 250 pounds of equip­ment wherever he went. He eventually traveled some 100,000 miles, pro­duced an unparalleled collection of photographs and, in the process, be­came a world authority on hummingbirds. Later he admitted, "Perhaps if I had known what the intervening years were to bring, I would not have had the courage to begin. [Yet] in retrospect, I wouldn't have missed a mile, or an hour, anywhere along the way."

Such an application of photography to special interest led the great Swed­ish photographer Lennart Nilsson to still another level, that of the profes­sional, for he converted his fascination with the natural world into a brilliant photographic career. He began early in life. By the time he was five he was already a knowing collector of plant and flower specimens. At the age of 12 he had started to photograph them in the wild; at 15 he produced a series of . pictures he called "The Nature of the Farm," which was published by a lead­ing Swedish magazine. Encouraged, Nilsson later went on as a full-time pro­fessional to do classic picture studies of everything from ant colonies to Arc­tic polar bears. In recent years, not content with photographing nature from the outside, he has devised ways to record its workings from within. In one picture essay for LIFE he actually used the tiny eyes of a dead wasp as lenses to show how an insect sees the world (in a mosaic of images, none too sharp). For another essay he attached a camera to a special miniature lens by means of a long, light-conducting cable and managed to photograph the inside of a human artery, cholesterol deposits and all. He spent the better part of seven years making what is probably his most celebrated series of photographs, showing the beginnings of life in the womb. Nilsson's pictures command attention not only because they reveal what had been hidden but because they are strangely beautiful. In this respect they are ex­amples of photography at its highest level, that of the search for beauty in any form film can record.

Nilsson discovers beauty in unusual subjects, but the most ordinary sub­ject matter can serve the artist as well.

It does for one photographer who works constantly at the artist's level, Henri Cartier-Bresson of France. He set only one goal for himself: that he lift "decisive moments" out of the broad spec­trum of people's lives. In pursuitof that goal as a professional photojournalist, he has spent his own life quite literally wandering around the world, walking along out-of-the-way streets, patiently watching people and their surround­ings until they fell into compositions that he felt had both beauty and mean­ing. He uses only one kind of camera, a Leica, and two extra lenses, yet de­spite his simple equipment and his quiet, seemingly aimless approach, his skills are every bit as disciplined as those of photographers with a trunkful of gear. And, like many seasoned photographers, his appetite for pictures still knows no bounds. "Photography," he says, "is an intuitive way to express oneself, here and now-an opportunity of plunging into the reality of today. It is one's guess of what life is. . . . With me the camera is a kind of magnet.

You want to catch the whole world in that little box, all the significant details

that add up to life."

Perhaps this is the greatest gift the camera can offer the serious photog­rapher: a means of seeing and, through seeing, understanding a little bit more about the "significant details" of life and the world around him. It is al­most axiomatic among professionals that a photographer sees a subject more clearly every time he attempts to photograph it, just as a painter opens up a richer visual world for himself as he works or a writer understands more deeply what he is writing about the more he writes.

This attraction-the lure of experiencing more of the world by catching it "in that little box"-inexorably pulls the photographer upward and onward, level by level. Perhaps the most striking example of this progression from level to level of his art is found in the career of one man, Edward Steichen. During eight fruitful decades, he has been an amateur, a professional por­traitist, a combat and reconnaissance photographer in two wars, a leader in magazine photography and a distinguished museum curator, but above all a restless explorer of his medium, of nature and of man.

Steichen was a 16-year-old lithographer's apprentice in Milwaukee in 1895 when he bought his first camera, a second-hand Kodak. The dealer loaded it with a 50-exposure roll of film, gave him a few pointers and sent him on his way. "My first exposure," Steichen recalls in his autobiography (A Life in Photography), "was of our cat sleeping in the show window of my mother's millinery shop. I used up the rest of the roll on various subjects about the house.  When the film came back I had a real shock. Only one picture ln the lot had been considered clear enough to print." That one picture, how ever, was a charming, sensitive portrait of his little sister playing the piano.

The young photographer was hooked. He bought another, larger camera and set up a darkroom in the cellar, after his mother had worriedly removed her jars of preserves a safe distance from the "dangerous, poisonous chem­icals," as she called them. "My only reliable information about developing," Steichen wrote, "came from the printed instructions in the box of plates. A few moments after I had put the first plate in the tray of developer and begun to rock it vigorously the image commenced to appear. And when I could identify it as the building I had photographed, I let out a terrific war whoop. My mother came rushing downstairs and called through the door to me, 'Is everything all right?' I said, 'You bet it's all right!' She thought I had been poi­soned and was in agony."

In his spare time, Steichen began to explore the basic levels of photog­raphy by taking pictures of all sorts of things: friends, relatives and group picnics (for 25 or 50 cents a print); pigs, hop-vines and wheatfields for ad­vertisements his firm prepared for clients; soft, misty woodlots he loved to walk in at the edge of town. When he discovered that raindrops falling on his lens transformed one of those woodland scenes into a more evocative pic­ture, he wet his lens for other pictures; when he accidentally knocked his tri­pod or had the lens out of focus and found it gave him an impressionistic effect of light or movement, he used the technique again on purpose. "I knew, of course," says Steichen, "that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches, and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was com­ing to realize that the real magician was light itself .... "

During his early twenties Steichen progressed to a new level. After a stint in Paris studying painting, but mostly taking pictures, he hung out his shingle as a portrait photographer in New York and joined Alfred Stieglitz in his pi­oneering efforts to establish photography as a unique art. It was in those years that he made his first commercial success as a professional and dis­covered ways of getting beneath the self-conscious poses people assume when sitting for a photograph; among his many portraits from this period is a classic one of the financier J. P. Morgan glowering at the camera, irritated with Steichen for suggesting an uncomfortable pose.

In World War I, Steichen became chief of the Army Air Service's aerial photography unit and served on the staff of General Billy Mitchell. In addition to an abiding horror of war, he gained a new respect for the technical powers of his medium, including the sharp, brilliant detail that was needed in pic­tures on whose proper interpretation soldiers' lives depended. In the 1920s and 1930s he moved to still another level, that of a skilled magazine pho­tographer, capturing for the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair the personal­ities of the famous people of the day-Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Maurice Chevalier, Carl Sandburg (who had become his brother-in-law), George Gershwin, Franklin Roosevelt. He also developed studio lighting and posing techniques that helped turn fashion and advertising photography from arti­ficialities toward a fresh, realistic approach. During this spectacularly suc­cessful period of his life Steichen became the most highly paid photogra­pher in the world.

When World War II came, Steichen volunteered once more, at the age of 62, and became head of combat photography for the United States Navy. In addition to some famous battle photographs of his own aboard the carrier Lexington, he supervised a later film about carriers (The Fighting Lady) and two exhibits at New York's Museum of Modern Art ("Road to Victory", "Pow­er in the Pacific"). Then, as the Museum's first Director of Photography, he turned the sum of his experience to a new role as curator, editor and teacher, creating some 40 more exhibitions, many of them introducing the work of tal­ented younger photographers to the public. In 1952 he embarked on a pro­ject that was to become his eloquent answer to war: an exhibit he called "The Family of Man." With it he achieved for photography a level of com­munication that no one had before. In pictures of poor people and rich peo­ple, white people and black people, old people and young people around the world, he stunningly conveyed the oneness of life in all its aspects: birth, death, work, love, children, suffering, joy. The show was the most widely seen and probably the most widely felt exhibit in history, traveling in six edi­tions to 37 countries. One American visitor to Guatemala reported that thou­sands of Indians came down from the hills, barefoot and on muleback, to see it, standing transfixed in front of photograph after photograph. Steichen was satisfied: "The people in the audience looked at the pictures, and the people in the pictures looked back at them. They recognized each other."

As he approached 90, Steichen retired with a lifetime of honors-and an "itch to photograph again." He began a whole new career at the highest lev­el of photography, a pure search for meaning in nature, form and light. In­creasingly, his efforts focused on a single subject that he could see from the windows of his Connecticut home: a tree he had planted himself some years earlier, a slender, lovely shadblow by a pond. An ardent amateur once more, he has photographed his tree in all lights of day and moonlight, in all sea­sons, in snow and rain, with still and movie cameras, in color and black and white. "Here was something in nature," he said, "that repeated everything that happened in life." Capturing its beauty, its moods, its growth and pro­gress has been for Steichen the ultimate challenge, one that never ceases to renew itself. Each picture shows him something different about the subject:

"Each time I get closer to what I want to say about that tree. There is an ex­citement about using the camera that never gets used up."