George Schaub - 20th century photographers : interviews on the craft, purpose, and the passion of photography

The interviews in this book cover a broad range of photographers and photographic disciplines. Each photographer made a living by concentrating on a specific aspect of the craft, but in doing so transcended his or her livelihood to become recognized for more than the type of images that he or she created. They all had a distinct style, creative approach, dedication to the craft, point of view about themselves and the world, and, for many, a unique ability to vigorously project themselves to a wider audience and clientele.

These interviews were conducted during a seminal period in the transition from film to digital photography and, as importantly, from print, magazine, and book reproduction to worldwide distribution on the Internet. They reveal only hints of what was to come, and while a few interviews here touch on those who embraced this distribution, processing, and printing change wholeheartedly, albeit during its infant years, most were as yet to be influenced or persuaded by it. In a sense, these artists and reporters and recorders of the world around them worked prior to or right on the cusp of these monumental changes.

These interviews can be thought of as historical documents, especially when photographers such as Carl Mydans or Gordon Parks talk about the FSA (Farm Security Administration), or when O. Winston Link describes in detail his lighting setups for his amazing record of the end of the age of steam railroads. As such they become resources for study, and hopefully inspiration, for photographers today. A number of the interviews reveal the state of the photographic world from the middle to the end of the twentieth century. They give us a snapshot of a world gone by, although the dedication and sense of craft revealed throughout are as important now as they were then. As you read through this text, you can also get a sense of how these photographers came up through the ranks and what it took for them to achieve their goals and vision.

What for me is most impressive about this collection is not the debate about film versus digital, or how technology affects the creation and publication of work. (Too much debate about these matters today recalls the old joke about Hemingway and Faulkner arguing about their favorite typewriters.) Rather, they go to the heart of the craft of photography, the overriding importance of vision and point of view, and the sense that the work was something more than a way to make a living, that it was a calling in which those engaged in the work understood what came before and how their work might fit into a legacy of photographic images that would survive into the future. This was not a pretentious stance, although some photographers are not shy about themselves or their work, but rather one that came from a sense of visual literacy, of understanding what came before, and how photography could affect and change the world around them.

One of the interesting aspects of the work of these photographers was their curation by editors, art directors, corporations, gallery owners, publishers, and at times organizations concerned with propaganda or social causes. These editors were the gatekeepers of what got published and what didnt in sometimes very competitive fields. Although one could ascribe various motives to this culling and curating of images, there is no question that it took an understanding of that infrastructure to get work published. These interviews include an underlying revelation of those environments and how each photographer dealt with them and, to me, describe the medium from the point of view of those who worked within and, sometimes, outside it. Today, the Internet allows publication of every image made, in stark contrast to how photographers dealt with the distribution of their work and how they made their living in the past.