Download PDF scan of original article

With the recent acquisition by the UCR Library of a major collection of nineteenth-century books on photography—some 767 volumes of great rarity and importance to the study of the medium’s history—the University Library has become a major research center in the field. The new additions are from the personal collection of Odette M. Appel-Heyne, a photography historian now living in Germany, whose best-known work is The Spirit of Fact: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes, 1843-1862, which she co-authored with Robert Sobieszek (Boston, David R. Godine, 1976).

The new special collection in photography-believed to be the largest such library to enter a public collection in more than a decade—supplements and deepens already extensive University Library holdings. The UCR Library already possessed a substantial number of reprint and microform editions of primary materials from the last century, along with major twentieth-century books (especially as they relate to the original materials at the California Museum of Photography), and actively maintained collections of current publications.

Because UCR holdings complement, and are complemented by, the famous Albert C. Boni Collection at UCLA (which, though less aggressive in its current growth than the UCR collection, includes some of the rarest incunabula of photographic books), the University of California’s collections in photography and its history are now unmatched in the western United States.

No single, modern invention has had a more pervasive influence on our culture than has photography. In every sphere of our lives, the photograph’s value as a carrier of information, and photography’s central function as a technological tool, are apparent.

This is no more evident than in the parallel and interdependent careers of the photograph and the book. The relationship between these two triumphs of civilization has existed since at least 1826. That year, Nicephore Niepce achieved his first major success in experiments directed toward a cheap, easy, and accurate lithographic process. In the bargain, he came up with photography.

Since that time, the technological development of printing and book production has advanced as photographic technology has moved forward. Today, virtually all books are printed by the process of photolithography, and most

typesetting has its basis, too, in a photographic process. Yet far more radical-if more subtle-relationships have also been created in 150 years of shared history.

At first, photographs in books were either actual, “tipped-in” photographic prints, or hand-wrought translations in etching, engraving, or lithography. The nineteenth-century search for a type-compatible reproduction process for photographs—a process which would economically allow both photographs and text to be printed simultaneously on the same page, from the same plate-ended in the 1880s with the introduction of the process halftone engraving (the “halftone”).

With that innovation came the first universally accessible distribution system for images. Pictures were no longer the scarce product of artists or highly trained artisans. Now these printed images—photographic images, with their dependable relationship to objects and events in the day-to-day world—could be quickly and cheaply shared with (or imposed upon) all strata of society.

The full implication of all this was not immediately recognized. Certainly, the widespread introduction of photographs into books, and the birth of the illustrated photographic “view book,” was immediate. Such photographically illustrated books are by far the most common examples of the integration of these two forms. But the effect of combining two such powerful instruments of communication was far greater than a mere summing of parts.

From the earliest announcements of the process, books about photography—its technical workings and its history—have also abounded. The newly formed special collection in photography at the University Library is particularly rich in this area. It includes, for example, a copy of one of the earliest editions of the first manual of photography. Of great interest, too, are the numerous bound volumes of popular periodicals containing early references to, and announcements of, the daguerreotype process.

But in almost a hundred years of photography—and fifty years of type—compatible photographic reproduction—true photographic books which were more than mere albums or photographically decorated texts were practically non-existent. The photograph and the book each have a unique syntax. Considered independently of content, each is a structure for communication with its own semiotic rules: each is a “language” of a sort.

By virtue of its historical development, the photograph has become a trusted metaphor for reality and truth. Over the last fifty years we have come to view photography as a system of notation and observation—a reporter’s notebook, occupying a place somewhere on the continuum between information and interpretation, but always related to real events. If a photograph can be manipulated, the manipulation is, nonetheless, of something which is (or was) real.

The book is sequential, progressive, linear. It is permanently arranged. As the photograph has become a symbol of the real and true, the book has been made our emblem of the logical.

When photographs began to be used in books, a new form was engendered (though it was not recognized as such until much later). Characterized by portability and multiplicity—essential qualities of both forms as they had come to be developed-the photographic book required no particular “exhibit” environment. Nor did it even necessarily require an understanding of verbal language; words, when used, tended to extend rather than limit meaning.

Late in the 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the photographic book saw its first real flowering. These books were related to experiments in film being carried on at about the same time—experiments both with technical/formal aspects of the medium, such as montage, and with the structure of the film narrative. Similar attempts to define essential characteristics in all media were the mark of the Modernist enterprise, and the development of the photographic book was a part of that overall effect. Whether self-consciously “experimental,” or simply conscious of the extraordinary power of the form, photographic books of the period are still among the most original and exciting.

The recent history of the photographic book is often marked by self-reflection, autobiographical narrative, brash appropriation, and even cynicism. The form continues, in other words, to be very much a part of its time.