The Online Photographer

So I have two or three more things to say about the T feature I wrote about on Wednesday.

John Camp suggested it needed a different title, and I agree. First of all, get rid of the word "The." The 25, or just 25? There's no "the." It's just 25. And leave the verb open-ended instead of trapping it in the vise-grip of the past tense. Consider the big semantic differences between these two variants:

The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age

25 Photos That Define the Modern Age

Secondly, ideally there would be a date cutoff point on the recent end as well. It's usually pretty foolish to consider that we have any perspective on very recent events. If the "age" or era in question starts in 1955, I would be inclined to end it in 2000 or 2010, or even 1990, because the "age" of Trump and COVID-19 and George Floyd is not the same age in which civil rights came along and Kennedy was assassinated and humans walked on the moon.

Thirdly, Jayanand Govindaraj wrote, "this [list] is so USA-centric that I can only identify with just two or three of the images." It's absolutely centered on the US and the West—even the Tianannmen Square picture, as that event was widely reported in the West but suppressed in China. So that needs to be acknowledged.

If it were me I'd also change "age" for "life" or "world."

So then you might have:

25 Photos that Define Modern Life for Americans, 1955–2010

That sounds a little more sensible and modest—and plausible—to me than the actual title. The word "for" in "for Americans" acknowledges the unavoidable USA-centrism but also leaves room for things that happened outside of the USA's borders or outside of its immediate interests. The Berlin Wall coming down or Nelson Mandela's release from prison, for instance.

And I'd personally be much more comfortable with a less hard-edged word than "defined." Reflected, perhaps. Or perhaps modify (and moderate) the word "define" with the word "help," since, let's face it, eras are not in any reasonable sense primarily defined by photographs at all!

Better choices
Next question: what photos would you include?

Of the panel's choices, I would retain only seven. The Gordon Parks shot; Malcolm Browne's photo of the self immolation of Thích Quảng Đức, except I'd choose the more widely known version, this one; Earthrise; Tomoko and her Mother in the Bath by W. Eugene Smith; the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum record photo of the blameless child who was murdered by the Khmer Rouge, which was the panel's single most inspired selection IMO; tank man, which was a choice in my own long-ago Top Ten list (as was the Gene Smith photo too, actually); and Falling Man.

Although of course you might make a policy decision to eschew photos which are already very well known, as some of those are. Over-familiarity can blunt the impact of even transcendent images, especially when you lump them too coarsely together.

I would include a picture by Salgado, but it would be of the subject suggested by Curt Gerston, such as the one on the cover of Salgado's Kuwait.

Like the panel did, I'd include an Arbus and a Friedlander, but my choice for Arbus, going along with David Drake, would be her picture of young Colin Wood with his toy hand grenade in Central Park. I could make a case for it, anyway—it shows her seeing the freakishness in normal people, and as a depiction of a child it was more subversive in 1962 than it looks now. I'd have to think about the Friedlander. I do think Friedlander is the central figure in American photography in the second half of the 20th century.

For me, the cellphone [sic] picture by Janis Krims of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, to stand for the emergence and spread of crowd-sourced journalism and information exchange.

Either Stan Stearn's photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. on his third birthday saluting his father's casket at the State funeral—the whole frame, which you can see as the top photo here—or Bob Jackson's shot of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. I might incline toward the former, since it is more about JFK. The assassination was the biggest event in the USA for a generation. Even decades afterward, most Americans who were alive at the time could tell you where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. The essential unsolved quality of it has also had a long afterlife.

Matt's suggestion of a Mapplethorpe is right on as well, both as a nod to the mainstreaming of LGBTQ culture and also as an implicit consideration of the AIDS epidemic. I'd think you'd need a sports picture; and a selfie; and some kind of picture about the military; and something representing the rise of Chinese manufacture—consider that in 2005 a family tried to go a whole year without buying anything marked "Made in China" and it turned their lives upside down. A very far cry from Mao's Cultural Revolution, and a global economic development that impacts every American and perhaps everyone in the Western world. We knew it long before the mask shortage.

It might be controversial, but I would include this photograph of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone in 2007. Not only is the iPhone the bestselling electronic gadget in history, but it changed communication and culture. It is the culmination of the personal computing revolution that the two Steves started in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos. The same technology that made it possible makes many other modern developments possible, and it's the common denominator of social media.

But even if you grant me all my choices so far, that's only 14. Meaning we would have 11 choices left. What do you think?

Pictures and writing
Any such list would need writing along with it. When pictures have significance, you can't just provide the picture and remain mute on what it means. Just consider the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum ID photo if you didn't know why it was taken or what the child's fate was. So the pictures would have to be chosen with at least some consideration for what could be written about them. They wouldn't have the luxury of existing in a vacuum.

The underlying problem
When I was a magazine editor, I became aware that the "size of the bite" is of paramount importance to the success of an article. You've got to bite off enough to chew but not too much to chew. There are topics that fit a short article and there are topics that are too big or too small. Same with blog posts. Same with novels or movies. Did the film The Judge from 2014 really need the secondary story of the divorce, the reunion with the old girlfriend, and especially the paternity of the old girlfriend's child, a sidelight that could have been a whole movie in itself? The script had too many stories going on at once, leaving some of them underdeveloped. If you write a 2,500-word article on, say, how to hold a camera properly, a lot of the article will have to be filler. On the other hand, I fielded article queries such as this one: "I'd like to write an article about color photography." Well, what about color photography? You can't cover the whole subject in a magazine article. It's way too big a topic for that.

T's article on essential Italian pasta dishes begs the question—there are 25? Seriously? You can't cover it in a dozen or a dozen and a half? That topic bites off too small an idea. Its article "The 25 Most Significant New York City Novels From the Last 100 Years," on the other hand, might be just the right sized bite. Surely there aren't 150 most significant NYC novels, but 25 gives the list some room to move and stretch, to cover the chestnuts yet also make space for some lesser-known novels, a newcomer or two, a few former outsiders, and a children's book. But "The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age" is way too big a bite. It would be tough to cover in 100 photographs.

The more I think about this, the more I think that's why the panel failed at their task so badly. Some of their choices show little awareness of how photographs define or reflect eras, and they got the relative importance of issues pretty badly skewed. They tried to cover Black issues and Black identity with some depth and sensitivity, but you simply can't restrict yourself to one area when you have so few pictures in total and such sprawling acreage you need to touch on. With 25 pictures, each picture has to shoulder a pretty big chunk of the burden of the concept. I'd say you'd have to start the process by defining the 25 most important concepts you want to cover, and work outward from there. Even so, you'd have to be alive to every opportunity you have to cover several topics in one photograph—in the way that, say, the Gordon Parks picture could stand for both the way Jim Crow laws stubbornly refused to let go their hold, and also the emergence of a Black middle class.

Flawed concept or not, though, I wish I'd had a shot at it. As you can tell, I like this kind of thing. Even though all lists by definition are at least faintly silly, they can be teaching tools and expressions of delectation, too. Choices have many ways of making points.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

C Jacobs: "The list is aspirational not informational. The title should have been 'If these 24 photos had defined the modern era, then the modern era would be the way I (we) would like it to be—and Cindy Sherman because I (we) have had a crush on her since the 1970s.' There is dignity for the suffering and oppressed, shame for the establishment and a couple of really beautiful pictures. Quite frankly most top 25 lists are aspirational—to get you to see the world the way the list maker wants you to."

John Camp (partial comment): "As a former journalist, I have growing doubts about the Times. I don't think the paper is well-edited anymore, and ideas like this one, on photography, are something somebody spitballed in an editors' meeting and somebody else put together in a few hours...."

[Ed. note: Read the rest of John's comment in the full Comments Section.]