Welsh Journals

THE CAMERA As HISTORIAN. The collection and preservation of old photographs has lately (and belatedly) come to be seen as a vital aid to our 'remembrance' of the past- remembrance' rather than 'reconstruction' because the photograph alone gives us a direct link, however tantalisingly momentary, with that past. For this reason, picture books enjoy a wide popularity with those who like to absorb their history in a flurry of impressions. Batsford are producing a new series of such pictorial histories of which these two volumes are excellent representatives.1 It is a particularly good idea to produce a number of local volumes in which a few familiar photographs can be supplemented by a taste of the thousands that exist in old studios or as postcards or family snaps in private hands. E. D. Jones has shown perseverance in locating them and acumen in presenting his choice. There are more marvellous finds in his book than in Julian Symons's; nonetheless, both conform to a well-established pattern with sections in the former headed 'Industry', 'Transport', 'Entertainment' and 'Some Notable Occasions', mirrored in the latter by 'People At Work', 'Getting About Faster', 'The People's Pleasures' and 'Social Occasions: Upper Class'. Their intention, then, is to give 'the feel of the Age' by representing various aspects of human activity. The very ease with which they appear to achieve this by showing 'real' images of the past obscures the difficulties that exist in compiling a proper pictorial history, that is, one in which the photographs would stand as documents used to illustrate an historical argument. The historian would be concerned with them, not as novelties, but as a novel type of evidence that sheds a limited yet intense light on the past. There have been distinguished attempts to investigate high art as an indicator of a society's social essence. The concentrated vision a great artist imposes on his work leads, inevitably, in that direction. Perhaps the existence of photographs as social ephemera has discouraged any except the most cursory glance at the historical significance they can yield. In their case the technique of investigation would have to be adapted to go beyond the examination of one work-or even one man's work-to penetrate the often unconscious images left to us in bulk by hands that will mostly remain anonymous. But what better start could there be to an understanding of the mass atomised societies we have inherited? The photographs of Victorian and Edwardian Wales are not so much windows into that lost world as frozen instances of time in which the construction of the scene can be as important as its content. No photo- graph after all is completely arbitrary in either its choice of subject or its composition. The first historical question must be concerned with the reasons for the abstraction from that contemporary time of the particular reflection that has survived. A choice has obviously been involved; further, it might be a dictated choice in that any number of aesthetic (or social) conventions, at all sorts of levels, may be at work in the photographer's mind. 1 Victorian and Edwardian Wales from old photographs, by E. D. Jones; Between the Wars: Britain in Photographs, by Julian Symons. B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1972. £ 2.50.