It’s been quite a time that I’ve been obscurely dissatisfied with ordinary photographic monographs. I suppose I shouldn’t complain: I’ve written texts for dozens of them, usually as an introduction before the pictures, and usually found much to like in the pictures concerned. No doubt the good ones still keep coming; the great ones, too, and probably at the same very slow rate as ever. But I’m getting a bit lost.

Photography books have boomed.  Anybody who goes to any of the interminable book fairs that have latched on to all the major festivals of photography will see that at a glance.  Interchangeably at Arles or at the Tate while PhotoLondon is showing or at ParisPhoto, tables seemingly hundreds of yards long piled high with books. There are too many of them to keep up, and the median levels of quality or intrigue or even beauty seem not always to be high. Monographs are too often paid for by the photographer or their gallery, so I don’t even see the commitment of an outsider’s time and budget that happens when a publisher takes a book on. Too many of them are simply promotional material and I’d often rather wait to see the exhibition if it ever comes. Too many of them are printed only in tiny print runs which seem to me aimed at the handful of collectors of photo-books and not really intended to circulate the ideas of the photographer. I often find that monographs smell of ‘projects’ to me – sets of pictures made in defined circumstances really just to see if a set of pictures could be made in those circumstances. 

I dismiss nothing and nobody here; but I observe my own dissatisfaction with books of this kind.  Instead of chasing them, I’ve rekindled an old enthusiasm for one subset of photographic books which maybe don’t get quite as much attention as they could.  Look at this wonderful spread: 

A speedy photograph of something that will vanish before it can be studied, next to a slow photograph of something whose normal existence is quick. The one is wholly documentary in execution but tends to reverie in meaning; the other which seems factual was wholly acted by the subjects and classically composed by the photographer. Both comment (if you’ll overlook my crude shorthand) on the urban environment. Each is changed by being next to the other: the staged, almost sculptural grouping of Bourouissa’s boys reminds us just how many more tower blocks need to be torn down, and how the realities of social urban planning have fallen short of the dreams it was launched upon. 

No one photographer could have done this.  This is the experience of selection, of comparison.  It is a harmonic display of photographs compared to the single melodic line of most monographs. It comes from a book which is simply titled ‘Une Collection’ – a sampler edited in 2015 from the many thousands of works held by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie [MEP] in Paris. I think it’s a very fine example of a genre which has slipped a bit away from the highest visibility. Unlike a monographic study, a sampler from a collection has a past of its own, separate from whichever history may be referred to in the pictures.  The MEP derived from Paris-Audiovisuel, itself a curious co-dependant of the Mois de la Photographie in Paris, which started in 1980.  The holdings, in other words, from which the book picks a few, were not assembled in one gesture, seamlessly. A collection has a curator who may or may not be the editor of the book. A collection has one or more stated purposes, but is also always plentifully affected by the chances of networks and markets and financial necessity. The result is that pictures are thrown together in ways which are often not quite deliberate.  And those collisions can seem quite odd even a few years later.  Curators and editors have to make sense of them in original and personal ways.  This bypasses that curse of modern art practice, by which creators have to justify so much of what they do in research terms that they seem almost to build-in the critical response to their work in the texts they prepare to go with it.  I persist in thinking that many monographs are ruined by this.  It’s defensive and pretentious and in the end reduces pictures to a supporting role illustrating the words that accompany them.  That does them no service.  I believe in pictures; we should be able to trust them to carry all the burdens of communication, however complex or sophisticated.  They don’t always need academic parsing or glossing.

Books of collections, then, reflect multiple and sometimes contradictory impulses.  I’m tempted to call these books polygraphs – not just by contrast with monographs, but also because the lie-detector is so-called precisely because it measures many different impulses at once, which is exactly what books of collections do. They often show passages in the building of the collection which were maybe less successful or simply weird. They resist the simple tag-lines so beloved of press releases and invite readings which are nuanced, perhaps even critical.  You can like or dislike a monograph, it seems to me, but anybody who merely likes or dislikes a collection has really not got beyond the surface.

I worked on a book of this sort, devoted to the very curious photographic collection of the Musée Réattu in Arles.  It was a revelation.  Only years after the museum had begun to collect did its curators even loosely begin to think about what they should add and what was not for them. A peculiar relationship with the Rencontres literally meant that many pictures which had been shown at the festival but which photographers could not afford to ship home afterwards were simply given to the museum.  

This vision of the museum as a respectable skip or dumpster is offensive to those of a sensitive disposition – but one can’t forget how often collections are started or driven by a single person at a time.  If that person has prejudices or simply circumstances which tend in one direction or another, the collection will infallibly reveal how those worked.  One example which I take to be fairly representative would be in the collecting interests of Beaumont Newhall, the historian and curator of both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and of the Eastman House in Rochester and as such a figure very central to the entire history of collecting of photography in the West. Newhall, although he spoke good German, began to collect for his major history in the 1930s.  For that reason, as noted by the historian Marta Braun, he was not able to visit photographers and collectors and dealers in Germany as much as he usually liked. The resultant gaps in the United States in the mainstream appreciation of German photography have simply not yet been fully plugged. 

One thinks of all the brilliant curators who have worked with tiny budgets to do something – anything – photographic in institutions which had not yet really ‘got’ photography.  The collections of the New York Public Library and of the Library of Birmingham which are both incredibly rich, even on the world scale, were both started by archivists (Julia van Haaften in the former case; Pete James in the latter) combing through the holdings to re-classify important photographs from whatever subject they had been filed under to a new and specifically photographic order.  Again quite literally, there has in these cases been the generation of incredible photographic riches simply by altering the library index cards which alluded to them.  

So collections have histories of their own – individual and institutional mixed. When books come out of them they may acknowledge those histories or may loftily or blindly ignore them for us to find later. The great English picture editor Bruce Bernard, had connections with journalism and specifically with the Sunday Times which quite overtly underpin his magisterial Sunday Times Book of Photodiscovery.  When he put together a collection for the Barbican (it was called All Human Life and was shown in 1994) it was sourced from the Hulton collection – the descendant of Picture Post and Lilliput – and necessarily still journalistic in flavour.  But by the time he came to putting together the private collection for James Moores which was published in part as One Hundred Photographs (Phaidon, 2000), the rules were looser whatever his own roots.  One memorable sequence in One Hundred Photographs runs like this:

  There’s Bruce Bernard in that sequence, for sure. 

Great collections show traces of their antecedents, too. The English gallerist Michael Hoppen produced a lovely and quirky and lightly scholarly book of his own collection (Finders Keepers, 2012) and sure enough, Hoppen found a print of Two Girls Smoking by Henry Guttmann some years after seeing it in All Human Life – and reproduces it with a generous credit to the importance of Bernard in the formation of his own tastes.  There are often great lines within collections of that sort, many of them yet to be traced.  Be they curators or dealers or less formally just mentors, there are dozens of links down through time.  To trace the influence of Sam Wagstaff or Weston Naef or Pierre Apraxine or Ute Eskildsen or Helmut Gernsheim beyond the works they owned (or cared for) would be a monumental but very revealing task. Who, for example, was not influenced by the incredible proselytism of Harry Lunn? Lunn was the great American dealer (and CIA man) who in later life lived in Paris and who patiently built the markets in early photography, in particular, and also in such later photographers as Ansel Adams or Robert Mapplethorpe.  Lunn proceeded with great generosity by lending works, explaining processes, researching biographies.  I know it because he was often so generous to me, most especially when I worked at the Photographers’ Gallery in London as a tyro print dealer. But he also shrewdly developed the cult of the limited print, and pioneered the wholesale purchase of photographic estates.  Look out for traces of Lunn wherever you go in photography for, although he died in 1988, we are not yet out of his shadow.  Is it possible still to say that the whole market in photography is a reflection of Lunn’s tastes and habits and circumstances?  An exaggeration, but not maybe by much.  It might be fun to collect the mentions of Harry Lunn in the acknowledgements pages of the books of the collections he inspired or enabled.

In Viewpoints, the catalogue of his personal collection made over to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston by the great New York dealer Howard Greenberg, the following sequence appears.

The caption suggests that the squiggles made by Chim’s subject are meaningless. But we remember enough to cast doubt: one of the more famous of Jackson’s Pollock’s paintings comes from that same year. It was called No.5, 1948 and was for a time the most expensive painting ever sold.  Not all squiggles are deemed to be meaningless. The next page is explicit: in one from the series of their great collaboration, Gjon Mili catches Picasso drawing with light at Vallauris in 1949, a perfect minotaur in his own manner.  Squiggles tamed. We turn a page, and Meatyard invites us look at two squiggles, not one.  A twisted wire on the wall (familiar to later viewers as a motif that recurs often to Roger Ballen) looks vaguely rude, but is impromptu, informal, ‘found’. Above it, a window grille (wrought iron or cast iron, I’m hazy on how to tell them apart) gives a kind of Moorish delight in the tight restraint applied to its own curlicues. In the next picture, the little window has been brought down to eye level and the squiggles have loosened to little more than marks.  Then Cartier-Bresson still has one figure looking at the wall with his back to us, but his windows are aligned like musical notation, a kind of hymn above those children nearer the camera. This is a soaring sequence of pictures, taking small pictoral gestures and twisting them like a fugue through each next picture. Greenberg and his editors are showing us how order can be given to the seemingly endless happenstance of photography.  It’s a wonderful demonstration, and one paralleled many times in the kinds of books I’m alluding to.

That Meatyard picture, by the way, is itself a huge reminder of how published and circulated pictures carry links within themselves – and how those links are themselves a lurking or subcutaneous part of the collection which goes on to house them.  Meatyard made the Georgetown Street series (they’re from Lexington, Kentucky, where he lived) in company with a still-young Van Deren Coke, and the pictures were exhibited in 1957 at the Photographers’ Gallery – a short-lived gallery in West 85th Street in Manhattan run by Ann Kuriakin who was Roy de Carava’s first wife.  In the year of the picture, 1956, Meatyard and Van Deren Coke attended a summer school run by Henry Holmes Smith at the University of Indiana, where they met and began largely to be influenced by Minor White and Aaron Siskind. Those are some of the connections right there which made Greenberg the gallerist he was. To trace them through his collections seems obvious – and not merely as a dusty exercise in doctoral writing. 

Greenberg wrote as the epigraph to this particular volume of his collection (he has put together several others over the years) “When something special comes along, I know it. But the collection was never about scholarship. I wasn’t trying to collect the history of photography. I never had a thesis. It came from the heart.”  That’s clear: many collectors have followed the same principle. Others have tried to follow a theme.  Sometimes these are dutiful: a museum of this or that will collect this or that by right. Joachim Bonnemaison collected only panoramic images, and although the old book of his collection is masterly, it is still a little prim. But how can you not be seduced by the collection of Henry M. Buhl, in which the prime collecting thread was that the pictures should always show hands?  Or the collection of William M. Hunt, which only admitted pictures in which eyes should be hidden or closed?  Both, by the way, are beautifully published, with two very different and equally exciting forms of writing to go with the pictures.  

Here is just one spread from the Buhl collection.  It asks for no especial commentary, I think. 

And here is one single image from Hunt’s collection, of Alice Neel, photographed as Hunt puts it “exhaling and escaping the weight of her being”.

Hunt includes, by the way, a great punch to the stomach of a Joel-Peter Witkin – a headless male cadaver on a stool, nude but for a pair of dark socks. It’s shocking, and Hunt discusses why it shocks in careful, thoughtful sentences (“Possessing this photograph seemed unthinkable. Whatever the limits of taste may have seemed, this passed beyond.  Possessing it was my statement of independence from all conventional considerations.”  Is something changed by the fact of Hunt being the collector of this and not the photographer?  

At their best, polygraphs – books of collections – do something that individual monographs cannot.  They allow pictures to crash or nestle together in ways which are telling.  They do miss the first-hand encounter with pictures direct from the photographer, sequenced or otherwise presented as the photographer wanted – and that’s something.  But they provide much else that I’m enjoying at the moment.  I’m staring at the delightful scholarly volume on the collection of Julien Levy by Katherine Ware and Peter Barberie (Dreaming in Black & White).  I think I feel a bit of a browse coming on. Or maybe I’ll just have a look a Jeffrey Fraenkel’s The Plot Thickens, on his own collecting.  Plenty to choose from.