Titre : The great history of photography
Auteur : Tom Ang
Edit: Larousse
Publication date: September 18, 2024
Genre of the book: art book
“The camera is for me a sketchbook, the instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” It is with these words borrowed from Cartier-Bresson and the iconic print by Dorothea Lange that Tom Ang’s ambitious project begins to explore the history of photography in an encyclopedia published by Larousse.
The matte cover, refined and graphic, does not highlight a photographic movement and therefore refuses any hierarchy. Simplicity is beautiful and temperate. Larousse offers a book which, even before being opened, stands out for all sensibilities as an aesthetic, modern and why not decorative object. The apparent minimalism of its composition lightens, moreover, a little the weight of the object which still exceeds two kilos. But how can we do less when it comes to capturing an art which, in two hundred years of existence, has continued to adapt to technical progress.
-From the beginning, photography must be built on disagreements. It belongs to the aesthetic as well as the scientific. But never completely both. Painters deny it its artistic legitimacy because of the ease with which it allows reality to be reproduced. Its chemistry is plural and depends on aspirations. She balances between several wishes. At the extremes, we find on one side the duty to restore reality and on the other the need to absolutely get rid of it. Then, the art of the snapshot crosses wars, political ideologies, but also technical progress and the evolution of pictorial trends. New debates are emerging, the most significant of which is perhaps that which opposes analogue know-how to the improvement of the tool through digital technology.
Photography is historical, partisan, subject to reality while being freed from it. She is rational and creative. It can be delicate or imposing. Tom Ang introduces us, with passion, to its many facets. But the journalist sometimes forgets that ordinary people do not share his expertise. It is almost necessary to already have the basics of how a camera works – the relationship between speed and aperture, depth of field, light reflection – development methods and products used during printing, to understand what Tom Ang is talking about. The encyclopedia is technical. And if, to fit everything in, it is necessary to get rid of the superfluous, that’s okay. But The great history of photography keeps its bet: to offer an encyclopedia as complete on a technical and artistic level. And what’s more, the object is pleasing to the eye.
