Looking Backward Through the Lens

VICTORIAN PHOTOGRAPHS OF FAMOUS MEN AND FAIR WOMEN by JULIA MARGARET CAMERON 120 pages. David R. Godine. $20.

THE FAMILY ALBUM Assembled by MARK SILBER 93 pages. David R. Godine. $15.

IN THIS PROUD LAND by ROY STRYKER and NANCY WOOD 191 pages. New York Graphic Society. $15.

"There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the fac es that you meet." So wrote T.S. Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

But that was long ago, and photography has come a long way, baby. Film is more sensitive. Lenses are cleverer and faster. For years people have been bombarded by sneak shots, candid exposes, sensitive impressions of subway straps, flying tackles artfully half-arrested in motion, slick distortions like the famous photograph of Estes Kefauver's huge hand symbolically extended toward the voting public.

Lately it has been possible to seek relief from frenetic and kinetic imagery by looking backward. Publishers are now offering a string of new picture books filled with the ancient snapshot, the static portrait and the severe documentary. Some of them are a bit special: albums of Victorian children and antique pornography. More than nostalgia or a desire for escape is at work, however. Portraits, especially of anonymous folk from the otherwise dead past, exert a peculiar fascination. One broods over them, foolishly nodding and speculating about what the people were really Like and the lives they must have led.

There is a growing suspicion, too, amply borne out by these three books--one Victorian, one turn-of-the-century, one from the great Depression--that a special truthfulness resides in pictures produced by a photographer who confronts his subjects steadily and holds them in affection or awe.

Julia Margaret Cameron was a Victorian of great eccentricity, some means and considerable connections. She was born the year of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and did not take a picture until 1864, when her daughter and son-in-law gave her one of the earliest models, which consisted of two wooden boxes, one sliding inside the other. "It may amuse, Mother, to try to photograph," they wrote her fondly. Little did they guess. At first Mother could hardly tell the difference between treacle and collodion, the sticky fluid used to coat her glass negatives. But she had an eye and the kind of cast-iron ego that always stands a photographer in good stead. "Few could withstand the extreme fury of her affection," Virginia Woolf wrote in the preface to the first edition in 1926 of Victorian Photographs, recalling Mrs. Cameron, who was the aunt of her mother, Mrs. Leslie Stephen.

Swiftly converting a coal shed into a darkroom, Julia Cameron began taking pictures of family, neighbors and acquaintances. As the sample gallery here shows, however, that group included much of the brains and beauty of England, not to mention the New World. Some of Mrs. Cameron's photographic subjects were pleased by her work. Darwin was charmed when the lady presented him with a slightly Neanderthal forehead. Next-Door Neighbor Alfred, Lord Tennyson complained to Mrs. Cameron: "I can't go anonymous by reason of your confounded photographs." He also thought she did a bit too much justice to the bags under his eyes. Yet he willingly betrayed a famous American poet into her clutches, remarking: "Longfellow, you will have to do whatever she tells you. I'll come back soon and see what is left of you."

Victorian Portraits is a reprint of the 1926 book, with a number of previously unpublished photographs added. Virginia Woolf s preface alone would be nearly worth the price, along with an essay by Roger Fry, the Bloomsbury art critic of the period. He begins inauspiciously:

"The position of photography is uncertain and uncomfortable ... Yet it will not give up its pretentions altogether."

But he ends by admitting that despite her dabbling in Pre-Raphaelite book illustrations, Julia Cameron's portraits will probably outlive most work by the painters of her age.

Mark Silber's Family Album is a slender, lineal descendant of The Boyhood Photos of J.H. Lartigue (1966), which re-created the town and country life of a rich and gifted Parisian family by matching Lartigue's early snapshots (1901-14) with his later recollections. Album offers the same era in the U.S. The pictures were the work of two youthful amateurs in the small, once prosperous town of Buckfield, Me. The recollections --a kind of dialogue--are provided not by the photographers, who are now dead, but by a son and a nephew. "I don't think Rebecca rowed very well" says one, commenting on a girl in a skiff.

"I doubt if she could row the boat across the North Pond in a week. " This un assuming collection of portraits, snap shots of sugaring off, cutting ice, cats, dogs and family parties quietly grows on the reader. The printing -- in sepia from glass negatives -- is so lovingly and sharply done that you can almost spot a song sparrow at 60 paces.

Human Dignity. Perhaps with the exception of catalogue notes for nonrepresentational painting, no subject lends itself more easily to pretentious twaddle than commentary on artistic photography. Album is blessedly free of this curse, and so are the recollections by Roy Stryker that begin In This Proud Land. He briskly describes how for eight years, with money from F.D.R.'s New Deal, he was able to send photographers roving all across the U.S. taking pictures.

Among the photographers were Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon and Walker Evans. They took some 270,000 pictures, which, among other things, helped make Americans aware of one another, offered lessons in history and agriculture, and brought documentary still photography to some kind of pinnacle where art, social purpose and journalism joined. Many of the photographs -- of sharecroppers and migrant workers--are justly famous.

Choosing his 197 favorites out of so many, Stryker, now 80, offers many of these. What stands out for the reader today are the portraits. There is noth ing candid about them. The subjects have prepared a face to meet the world and are all the more revealing as a result. Paul Carter's formal view of a tuberculous family in New York is touched with an eerie stillness. But the exchange is certainly marked by what Stryker describes as "a natural regard for human dignity." Says Stryker: "Experts have said to me that's the face of despair. And I say, look again. You see in those faces something that transcends despair."

Stryker admits that Walker Evans' work stood out from the rest with a kind of cold beauty. But the sharecropper viewed close up from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is one of only a few included in the book. A pity. Critic Lincoln Kirstein was nearly right when he said that in Evans' photographs, "even the inanimate things, bureau drawers, pots, tires, bricks, signs, seem to be wait ing in their own patient dignity, posing for their picture." The last word on all these photographs, however, perhaps should go to James Agee, Evans' admir ing partner in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Describing his love and admiration for the poor sharecroppers whom he and Evans celebrated with "the motionless camera and the print ed word," Agee wrote: "Above all else, don't think of it as art."

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