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ICONS

One September day in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, the PR team forone of the world’s wealthiest clans set out to fan excitement for the family’s latest project:Rockefeller Center, some 6 million square feet of skyscraper space built on 22 acres in the heart of Manhattan. The team took a lot of photos that day, but only one became iconic. It showed 11 men sitting casually on a girder 800 feet above the pavement. They chat, scan newspapers, cadge a light, all while dangling their feet in an ocean of thin air. Lunch Atopa Skyscraper suggests the peril that yawned in 1932, when America, and the world,dangled over an abyss. And it contains the crazy confidence of a nation that knew the gravest danger was fear itself.Iconic photographs lodge first in the viscera, then move to the brain to unpack their meanings. Nat Fein’s forlorn image of Babe Ruth’s last appearance in Yankee Stadium, his luster eclipsed by time and cancer, contains all there is to know about the paths of glory.When James Van DerZee’s picture of black New Yorkers in furs was discovered in 1969, it reanimated the Harlem Renaissance in a way no shelf of books could do. The catastrophe of the AIDS epidemic can be felt in a glimpse of Therese Frare’s picture of David Kirby on his deathbed.A photograph is, in a sense, the fossil version of light, a kind of time machine bringing a moment of the past forward while ferrying the present into the past. Iconic photographs,like those of the fossils of Olduvai Gorge, record more than a jawbone or a footprint. They suggest a world.

EVIDENCE

Knowledge is power, said Sir Francis Bacon—and photography greatly expanded access to that power. Before photography, humans bore witness only with their own eyes,and what were the chances that any person would be in the right place at the right time?All other accounts were secondhand at best; then, as now, the credibility of re-tellings was questionable.Seeing is believing. But that’s not the end of it. Believing often leads to caring, and caring can grow into action. Civil rights leaders understood this in the years after World War II. If only white Americans could see the disfigured body of the lynched teenager Emmett Till, or watch as snarling police dogs attacked peaceful demonstrators.A photograph is not a manifesto, nor is it an agenda. But it can stir up the ground in which movements take root. The gradual shift in public opinion against America’s war in Vietnam, for example, cannot be separated from the photographs that documented the chaos and brutality. Or it might be said that Barack Obama’s road to the White House was paved with photographs from Abu Ghraib prison, for Obama—alone among the major candidates—had opposed the Iraq War.This is why tyrants fear and manipulate photographs. Some images are doctored,others are suppressed. In China, many college students have reportedly never seen the1989 image of a lone man confronting a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. The picture is too dangerous to the powers that be. It might move others to stand up.

INNOVATION

Art and science—though sometimes sketched as opposites—are really two volumes in the same marvelous book. Both express the human longing to share what we see, in the world and in our imaginations.Photography began as chemistry. Light will leave its mark indefinitely in certain compounds. First using asphalt, then switching to silver in the presence of iodine and mercury, Frenchmen Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre,working in the 1820s and ’30s, preserved the visible character of photons as they reflected off physical objects.

But the chemists were also craftsmen. Even in Daguerre’s earliest pictures, artistic principles of composition and form were on display. Early portrait photographers, like Mathew Brady and Julia Margaret Cameron, consciously shared the traditions of painters like Jan van Eyck and John Singer Sargent.

No other art has drawn on such rapid scientific innovation. As media for capturing images evolved and improved, from copper plates to sheets of glass to celluloid rolls to silicon, photography became portable and inexpensive. Faster shutters and higher film speeds made it possible to freeze motion—and to make motion pictures. First in the darkroom, and now with digital tools, photographers learned to layer their pictures with artistic interpretation. Cameras that record light beyond the visible spectrum have shown us both the world inside our own bodies and the nebulae of incomprehensibly distant galaxies.

Now photography is rapidly becoming the first art that every human being will engage in. What started in 1900, when George Eastman introduced the first Kodak Brownie camera, has accelerated exponentially with the invention of the smartphone. Can the art keep up with the science? In the days before photography, William Blake exhorted: “Tosee a World in a Grain of Sand, and Heaven in a Wild Flower.” It is a task for the human eye and spirit, and the camera is but a tool.