Book Comparison: History of Photography

Initially I started out with comparing two books, Hirsch’s, Seizing the Light and Taschen’s, A History of Photography. Although the writing styles are different, as are the placement of images within chapters, I felt that each book heavily relied on the George Eastman collection for their image sources and history. In the spirit of fair representation and research I chose a third book, Szarkowski's, Photography Until Now.

Taschen’s A History of Photography reads more like a catalog of the George Eastman collection than a collection of photographic history and information. With that being said, it would be incorrect to think that Taschen’s work is somehow less important. On the contrary, the book is a superb source for visual information. Although many of the images that appear in Taschen also appear in Hirsch, Taschen is very distinguishable in two important ways. First is that he features a large number of images of minorities and women. There are many images in the book that most people have either never seen before or have seen them very seldom anywhere else. The amount of images crammed into the little book is impressive. Second and perhaps the most interesting fact is that Taschen does not have the “holy grail” of images. The first photograph ever made is not in the George Eastman collection and therefore does not appear in Taschen’s book. What Taschen does offer instead is a picture of the “king” of photography himself, George Eastman.

What impressed me about Robert Hirsch’s book is the way he placed captions for images that were used throughout the book. Unlike many photo history books that place an image on the page as reference for the artist, Hirsch combines many of the images he uses with descriptive text, giving more of a context to an image other than just the dimensions, process by which it was made, year and name of its creator. The caption text is effective because it gives the reader a glimpse of the context in which to place the images, letting the reader relate the image with things like the historic events or places of origin. Effectively, the book works in a multi layered fashion, like two books in one. One layer tells about the general history of photography and the second layer deals more intimately with each image and the thoughts that went into making that image.

Szarkowski's, Photography Until Now, caught my eye for one reason. Szarkowski dedicates more space in the book for images. Instead of looking at an image that’s about thumbnail size, Szarkowski’s images are bigger (although not actual size). There are entire pages that contain only images, allowing the photographs to live by themselves without having the text infringe upon their freedom. It’s shocking that more authors or photo history books are not as generous to their images. After all, a history of photography should acknowledge the power of the image to speak for itself without having cumbersome words taking away from the visual language and glory.

The comparison inspired me to look deeper into how photo art historians use images to accompany their text. It is interesting to see what images each author chooses to include and exclude from their book because that dictates how the history of photographic art is written, read, studied and viewed in the future. The power of images is undeniable.