The other side of the lens

Cartier-Bresson made his name recording countless and nameless people in scenes conveying the humdrum, strange and dramatic nature of life. To have denied photographic access to himself seems unjustly one-sided, but that’s a great artist for you. He is considered to be the father of modern photojournalism.

Liddy describes him as “a master at capturing the decisive moment. He sensed it was going to happen. In his images you can almost hear him saying to himself, ‘not yet. Wait. Nearly. One more moment. Perfect’. Click.” His own description of his craft was: “To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It’s a way of life.”

One of Cartier-Bresson’s most famous pictures suggests the chaotic emotions in the immediate aftermath of war. It captures the expressions of inmates at the Dessau concentration camp at the moment when a woman among them is exposed as a Gestapo informer.

Two years later, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa – who also features in the exhibition – and others, founded the Magnum agency, a cooperative pledged to chronicling the world in all its ways. But Liddy was also anxious to include pioneering photographers whose personal lives were as notable as their work.

Eadweard Muybridge, for instance, was an Englishman who emigrated to America, survived a stagecoach crash, and in 1877 technically resolved one of the most hotly-debated topics of the day: are all four hooves off the ground at the same time when a horse gallops?

The movement was too rapid for the human eye to determine but he verified called “unsupported transit” through a sequence of photographic exposures in a process that helped lead to the development of cinematography.

Oh yes, and Muybridge also shot his wife’s lover in California, stood trial for murder but was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide.

Back in England, he gave a sell-out lecture on photography and his innovative techniques, and in the audience was the future Edward VII.

One of Liddy’s favourite subjects is George Davison, a civil servant in London and serious amateur photographer specialising in landscapes and impressionistic photography. His work attracted George Eastman whose photographic materials business became Kodak. Davison joined the company and was made a director which in due course created conflicts.

Becoming a wealthy shareholder clashed with his radical political views in the early 1900s. Davison mixed with anarchists and was spotted on a workers’ protest march. “Associating with the lower orders and not even wearing a hat in public was regarded by Kodak as unacceptable behaviour for a gentleman and shareholder,” explained Liddy, “It resulted in him being pretty much forced out of the company. But he was true to his values. A rebel, with and without a camera.”

So too was Edith Tudor Hart. She was a communist who fled to Britain from Austria in the 1930s, married into a privileged family but used the camera as a means of highlighting slums and poverty in the hope that her images published in popular magazines would help bring about change.

She also sought to speed the process by other means, working with contacts from the Soviet Union in the recruitment of Kim Philby and others connected with the Cambridge spy ring.

Compare her motives and artistic drive to those of Lady Clementina Hawarden whose photographs from the mid-19th century explore femininity and family relationships in the fashionable drawing rooms of London.

Such social extremes make the exhibition’s main point – that ever since its discovery was announced in 1839, the camera has been the tool of a creative multitude covering every aspect of the human experience. It’s used to record the battlefield, squalor, hope, beauty, the unrepeatable moment, or, in the case of Tony Ray-Jones, wonderful glimpses of the English at leisure in the 1970s.

Arthur Fellig, on the other hand, was driven by a desire to be the first on a news story, and to get the picture to prove it. He followed the emergency services around New York’s Lower East Side and the result was uncompromising shots of urban life, crime and violent death. His psuedonym was Weegee, a phonetic rendering of Ouija owing to his knack of arriving at a drama almost before it had happened.

Fellig’s own work is not in the show but instead there’s a picture of him behind a Zenit 3M, taken in Coventry of all places, and hinting at the frenetic personality which made him so effective on troubled streets.

The choice of image also highlights the dilemma Liddy had in deciding which 22 photographers should be represented in the exhibition, and how much of their complex lives he could tell in captions. Then there was the problem of selecting a representative 100 photographs from among the museum’s collection of millions. It was an almost impossible task, and he knows that some inclusions and omissions risk controversy.

Cameras and equipment tracing photography’s development are also featured, which at least in one case made the job of choosing material easier.

It concerns a picture of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian writer, historian and teacher. Liddy, a fellow Scot, couldn’t resist using the image, not when his department possesses the very lens Julia Margaret Cameron looked through to take the great man’s portrait in 1867.

Brian Liddy, added: “Photography has been with us for more than 170 years and in that time countless famous images have been taken. They have become so well known the photographs have often overshadowed the lives and motives of those who took them. This exhibition aims to redress the balance.”

The show begins with an investigation into the rivalry between two of the medium’s earliest pioneers, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot.

Daguerre, a former theatrical designer, presented the photographic process to France and the world in 1839. Working in parallel, but also in competition, Talbot, a Classics scholar who became MP for a seat in Wiltshire, created the first negative from which multiple photographs could be produced. He also strayed into his rival’s territory, making famous photographs of Paris, as well notable scenes of York and Oxford.

As technology evolved, photography’s range increased, and the methods by which it could provide a source of income, or artistic expression, became more diverse.

Julia Margaret Cameron, through her personal connections, produced some of the first celebrity images. Olive Edis was famous for her portraits and use of autochrome colour and her subjects included George Bernard Shaw, Emmeline Pankhurst, the Duke of York and beautiful seascapes.

Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine were motivated by conscience to record the Great Depression in America. And it was a Londoner, Larry Burrows, a school-leaver at 16 who landed landed a job with Life magazine, who produced some of the most iconic photographs of the Vietnam War. His work cost him his life. Burrows was killed in 1971 with three other photojournalists when their helicopter was shot down over Laos.

The exhibition also provides insights into the thought-processes of a great photographer. The notebooks of Tony-Ray-Jones are as intriguing in their way as the scenes he captured, detailing what was going through his mind, and what he hoped to achieve, in the hours, minutes and moments before he pressed the camera button. He’s not well known to the general public, but his influence within photography has been immense.

So why, when he’s surrounded by so many aspects of his passion for photography, doesn’t Brian Liddy own a camera and take at least the occasional snap himself?“I just know I’m not as good as I’d want to be, so I take comfort in studying the work of those who were.”

* The Lives of Great Photographers, National Media Museum, Bradford to September 4. Free entry. 0844 856 3797 www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk