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Being There By Alan Attwood
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Date Posted: 13/11/10 1:44:47
Back to Multimedia: A Century of Photos
Being There
By Alan Attwood
THEY shall not grow old. There is a magical timelessness to photographs. As years pass, newspaper pages become yellow and fragile. Pictures upon them may fade, but the people and events they record are etched in time. "Jezza" is forever airborne high above the MCG turf; Gough endures as an Easter Island statue of defiance on the Parliament House steps; Jean Shrimpton still strides the Flemington lawns in her daringly short shift; Ronald Ryan, shirt-collar undone, stares ahead, daring anyone other than a higher power to judge his guilt or innocence. These are images preserved not only in photographic negatives or plates or digital files but in our collective consciousness. They are how we remember and understand the chapters of our lives.
Photographs, especially those in newspapers, never exist in isolation. Context is all. By themselves, pictures of a passenger jet and a landmark city building are banal. But when they are in the same frame, and the plane is United Airlines Flight 175 about to explode into the south tower of the World Trade Centre, we have the single most appalling image of September 11, 2001.
And the sky is a brilliant blue. A single photo compresses past, present and future. It is now impossible to view any of the myriad pictures of Princess Di or Marilyn or JFK or Harold Holt or Benazir Bhutto without thinking of what happened to them later. We see things differently knowing what is to come.
So what are we to make of an image from 1908, showing several groups of figures, mostly men wearing hats, many with hands on hips? Technically, it's not great - like a still from a flickering TV screen. Most of the people have their backs to the camera. They are interested not in the photographer and his cumbersome equipment but rather the scene of destruction around them. It is the aftermath of a railway disaster at Sunshine on April 22, 1908; 43 passengers were killed, The Age reported the following day, with a further 145 "more or less injured". For the first time, a news story in The Age was accompanied by a photograph - one that, frankly, does not convey much of the drama of the situation. Despite its shortcomings, it supports the case of anyone arguing that papers have always been most interested in bad news: the first photograph, like so many over the century to follow, is of a disaster, a scene of sudden death. But it also raises an intriguing question: why did it take The Age so long?
Photography was well established in 1908. As far back as 1827, in France, a fuzzy "heliograph" image had been captured on a pewter plate after an eight-hour exposure. By the mid-19th century, the likes of Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire had posed for photographic portraits. In 1855, the year after the publication of the first edition of The Age, photographs were taken of the military campaign in the Crimea; one shows a field littered with cannon balls, like the droppings of a malevolent roaming beast. In Melbourne in 1860, a photographer was present when the doomed Burke and Wills expedition assembled in Royal Park. Within a few years, photographs made Americans aware of the carnage of their Civil War. In 1903, when Orville Wright coaxed a rickety machine a few feet above North Carolina sand-dunes for all of 12 seconds, a Coast Guard man with a camera captured the beginning of the aviation age. Less than 66 years later, Neil Armstrong used slightly more sophisticated equipment to snap fellow-astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing on the surface of the moon.
The problem for newspapers, indeed all print publications, was that photographs advanced quicker than ways of reproducing them. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln (without beard) posed for a portrait. But it could only be printed after it was turned into a woodcut, a mirror-image of the original, with Lincoln's right hand, rather than left, resting on a pile of books. Even when such technical issues were resolved, the primacy of the printed word endured. Newspapers that took themselves seriously, like The Age, underplayed photos: the first front-page picture did not appear until 1941 (it featured RAAF aircraft). Since then, there has been a steady evolution in photographic technology and the appreciation by editors of the power of images. Like words, they can shock and surprise; prompt tears as well as laughter. But a single image can often be more eloquent than a great many words.
When I first came to The Age in the late 1970s, reporters and photographers had different domains in the newsroom (and still do). It was the era of 35mm film and the darkroom, a mysterious place from which photographers emerged, sometimes wearing aprons, more often with shirtsleeves rolled up, bearing black-and-white prints still dripping from rinsing trays. Around 6pm, the day's photographs would be laid out on a bench to be inspected by the editor himself and a phalanx of supernumeraries, who would troop down to inspect offerings like buyers at a fish-market. Position was all. Photographers would try to place their 10x8-inch prints to best advantage. If that meant slightly obscuring a colleague's work, well, adages about love and war also apply to picture selection. Old hands had their tricks, too. John Lamb invariably managed to be around, ready to offer a helpful commentary on his latest shot. Bruce Postle preferred to make his entrance mid-conference, rushing from the darkroom with a larger than usual print - strangely, the 10x8 paper always seemed to have run out when "Poss" manned an enlarger. Pictures selected were taken away to be sized-up by page subs; those left behind were like unwanted orphans, most doomed to a slow death in the "Hold" basket.
In those days the custom was for reporters and photographers to travel to assignments together. Photographers drove; some much better (meaning slower) than others. In return, our job was later to supply such tiresome details as the correct spelling of the names of picture subjects. For young reporters, such drives represented opportunities to absorb the wisdom of tribal elders. We listened to lectures that invariably began with a denunciation of the job in hand ("Why are we bothering with crap like this?"), moved on to pungent character assassination of newspaper executives ("What would they *&%#ing know anyway?"), then progressed to an update on the photographer's love-life or marriage, which weren't always the same thing. Working together also meant witnessing how a spark of imagination or daring or sheer front ("Minister, would you mind slipping off your suit jacket and doing a few press-ups?") could turn a nothing job into a potential front-pager.
Photographers all carried, and sometimes lost or left behind, much the same equipment. But, just like reporters, they differed remarkably in their ability to see things. This ability can seldom be taught and is generally what separates great newspaper photographers from the rest. Above my desk I have a photo of baseball great Babe Ruth making his farewell from Yankee Stadium in 1948. It shows Ruth, in his pinstriped uniform, from behind. In front of him are his teammates, a small posse of photographers, and the crowd, applauding. Nat Fein of the New York Herald Tribune won a Pulitzer prize for this shot, which dared to ignore the subject's face. Instead, it showed what Ruth himself saw, standing alone, supported by his baseball bat, just two months before his death.
Fein had to work quickly to conceive and take this photo. For this reason, reporters generally have it much easier than photographers. Many stories can be pieced together after the event - on the phone, or through second-hand reports or witness statements. But the best photographs rest on one thing: being there. This applies equally to photographs taken for news or sport or arts or feature pages, although the personal risks are greater at disaster scenes, fires or floods or cyclones. A camera is more intrusive than a notebook, which is why the best photographers develop ways to gain the trust of their subjects. Without this trust, Malcolm Fraser would never have allowed Postle to photograph him - in a hotel bed, still in his pyjamas - after an election victory (it didn't hurt, of course, that Fraser himself was a camera buff).
In the 30 years since I was first at The Age, let alone the century following that railway disaster in Sunshine, there has been a remarkable evolution in newspaper photography. Medium-format cameras surrendered to SLRs; film gave way to digital technology; the darkroom disappeared and was replaced by rows of computer screens. Flimsy strips of negatives were out; memory cards came in. Try holding them up to the light. Photographers who not that long ago took over motel bathrooms to develop films now send images across the globe with a mouse-click.
But for all the changes, just as in the song, the fundamental things still apply. In essence, they're all means to the same end. Seeing something. Seizing the moment and capturing it. Freezing time so that while everything around us moves and shifts and shakes, slivers of seconds in our lives are preserved for ever.
*Alan Attwood, a Walkley award winner and former New York correspondent for The Age, is now editor of The Big Issue magazine.
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