Timekeepers

by Simon Garfield

  When AP entered the famous photograph for the Pulitzer Prize that year it had a title: ‘The Terror of War’. When it won, in the ‘Spot News’ category, Ut was still in Saigon. On 8 May 1973, 11 months after the napalm attack, the photographer’s name became famous to the outside world, and the subject of a historic photograph himself when he was captured being embraced and kissed by the American news reporter Edie Lederer not long after the news came through. They were in an office of some sort, with Lederer side-on and Ut smiling directly at the lens. The photographer in this case was another AP man, Neal Ulevich, who was on the spot to mark what was assumed to be the end of the story. In the AP files the key source words accompanying the picture are: Standing Kissing Congratulating Embracing Smiling.

  When I met Nick Ut in Germany in May 2014 he ran through his story in brief without much prompting. It is what he’s been doing for forty years. Now in his mid-60s, he is a short and stocky man, hair almost entirely white, articulate eyebrows and a mouth that is either smiling or about to. He now lives in Los Angeles and was still working for AP. He did all sorts of things – news, politics, celebrity – and still went where he was sent.3 I took a picture of him posing with his Leica camera, and the grin broke wide – almost incongruously so, given the fact that he was standing in front of an enlargement of his famous photograph backlit by a light box.

  Nick Ut was in a birthday mood, as was everyone that day. We were at a place called Leitz Park, on the outskirts of Wetzlar, a small town about an hour’s drive north of Frankfurt, to celebrate Leica’s 100th anniversary. At an exhibition showing what Leica could do, Ut’s photograph hung alongside other photos that could also be summed up in three words: ‘Sailor Nurse Kiss’, ‘Spain Falling Soldier’. Almost all of the photographers named in the opening paragraph of this chapter, many of whom regarded their Leicas as extensions of their bodies, were also represented with enlargements on light boxes, and some of them, including Elliott Erwitt, were also in attendance as paid Leica ambassadors. We were really here for a joint celebration: a century of steady technological advance for an inspirational piece of machinery, and those single brilliant moments – that ecstatic kiss – that the machinery made possible.

  Unlike the rest of Wetzlar, which can trace its roots back to at least the eighth century, and is predominantly made from timber and brick, Leitz Park is mostly steel, concrete and glass, part of it in the shape of a grooved-rim lens. The site had recently become Leica’s gleaming new headquarters, a 15-minute drive away from its former home at Solms. It incorporated a factory, a museum, an exhibition space, a café and, of course, a shop, where you may try to resist buying a Leica insulated mug, a Leica umbrella and a USB stick that slots into a rubber key ring shaped like a Leica. That day there was a four-hour auction too, at which a small wooden shop display stand with a Leica logo reached £4,650; an advertising poster went for £8,235; and Elliott Erwitt’s Magnum press card signed by Robert Capa reached £20,900. Then there were the cameras, topping out at £465,000 for an early motorised model from 1941 that was capable of taking 250 photos on a single roll of film (the camera of choice on German bombing raids, which went some way to explaining its rarity).

  All of Nick Ut’s most valuable gear had already been snapped up by the Newseum in Washington DC, where you may see his Leica M2 with the 35mm Summicron lens from June 1972. His situation reminded me a little of Roger Bannister’s – a lifetime of work distilled into a split second. And then other absurd similarities suggested themselves. Like Bannister, Kim Phúc is also running – running away, but also into a new and famous future; it is the running that saved her. And you could find a thousand runners breasting the tape at a finish line the way Ut has frozen her in time.4

  He told me he keeps in close contact with Kim, who is now married with children of her own and lives in Canada (she defected with her husband during their honeymoon in the early 1990s). She is a goodwill ambassador for UNESCO and heads a foundation that provides support to child victims of war. Ut says she still suffers pain from her burns but is kept strong by her Christian faith. She says she is happy being known as ‘The Girl in the Picture’.5 She calls him ‘Uncle Nick’.

  Ut also spoke of a long-standing misinterpretation surrounding his photograph. Some reports have suggested the napalm attack from two South Vietnamese planes on Trang Bang that day was misdirected, but he disputes this. When they re-entered the village a while later, American troops found many dead Viet Cong, the intended target. Ut thinks that the pilots had assumed that the previous civilian inhabitants – Kim Phúc and her family among them – had already fled. He said that most people called the photo ‘Napalm Girl’, but he still preferred to call it ‘The Terror of War’.

  The story of Leica cameras, like the famous images they’ve made of the world, is one of good judgement matched with good timing. Many factors in film photography have focused on speed – the shutter, the film transport lever, the time it takes to load a roll as the world rushes by. The digital obsessions – the speed of processing, the number of frames per second – are not that different. But the Leica story is the one that made it possible for a photographer to be at the right place at the right time in the first place.

  Between 1913 and 1914, an asthmatic amateur photographer named Oskar Barnack was getting tired of lugging a tripod and cumbersome bellow-type camera around his local German forest. He had began his career as an optics engineer at Zeiss, and, not long after he moved to rivals Leitz to specialise in precision microscopes, he wondered about substituting the heavy and fragile glass plates he used for each photograph with a radically smaller negative, leading to a camera so small it could fit in his pocket. Barnack thought of using movie film; he had seen a similar idea at Zeiss using a negative of 18×24mm, but the images it produced were awful. And then he had one of those perfect moments: what if he turned the film on its side and doubled the width, so that it now measured 24×36mm? His first metal prototype camera was designed so that the film could be threaded through horizontally (unlike cine film in a movie camera). The results were astonishing. The tiny image withstood enlargement to the size of a postcard, and he had found the ideal aspect ratio of 2:3. The next part of the story was equally enchanting: the number of frames on his first rolls of film – 36, the industry standard – arose from the length of Barnack’s outstretched arms, the maximum number he could manage in one unspooled strip. Not quite true, alas: his arms were longer than that, and the first spools of cine film could take 40 shots.

  Barnack gave his camera a lens previously milled for microscopy and started taking photos of his children and the Wetzlar streets (tourists now come to snap from the same spot where he took a picture of a large timbered building that still stands today). But the most important early photos were taken in 1914 by Barnack’s boss Ernst Leitz II, who took Barnack’s second prototype on a trip to New York and on his return pronounced it worthy of ‘keeping an eye on’. The camera’s name was initially ‘Liliput’, and then ‘Leca’ for LEitz CAmera. Those who tried it called it revolutionary.

  The war intervened, and the first commercial models only appeared in 1925. They were not an instant success; purists dismissed them as toys and struggled to grasp the novel concept of producing a big picture from a small negative (Leitz also made enlargement apparatus). But by the end of the 1920s the camera’s worth had been re-evaluated, and early adopters praised its portability and ease of use. Political artists André Breton and Alexander Rodchenko immediately saw the potential of what they called a ‘fixed explosive’ – the dynamic freezing of motion in a world of upheaval. Documentary photographers could meet the huge demand from the flourishing news magazines by shooting the world from the hip. And in 1932 a prince of photography put his ‘eye of the century’ to the viewfinder, and the world changed yet again.

  ii) ‘I am Muybridge and this is a message from my wife’

  Henri Cartier-Bresson immediately saw his Leica as a weapon. He had been big-game hunting in Africa and, using a voc
abulary that has been part of the photographer’s lexicon ever since (loading, shooting, capturing), compared the Leica to his gun. He particularly admired the instantaneity of his camera – the way the reflex of the shutter recalled the reflex of a rifle. His targets were often ordinary Parisians, and no one has ever taken a more inspirational portfolio of images (his only competitor in this field is Robert Frank, whose pictures for his 1958 book The Americans were also shot on a Leica). After the Second World War, much of which he spent as a prisoner of the Nazis, Cartier-Bresson adopted a less confrontational though no less exacting approach, something he would much later compare to the more graceful sport of archery.6 He became the medium’s first superstar, and by the time he co-founded the Magnum photo agency with Robert Capa and others in 1947, his work was already hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  In 1952, he also became linked to the most famous phrase in the history of photography, although the phrase wasn’t actually his. The term ‘decisive moment’ appeared as an epigraph to Cartier-Bresson’s introduction for a new collection entitled Images à la sauvette (roughly: Images on the Run). It was taken from the memoirs of a seventeenth-century Frenchman named Cardinal de Retz, and the full quote was ‘There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.’ ‘A’ decisive moment is somehow less definitive than ‘the’, but the change was made when the collection was published in America and the phrase was used as the main title. The term and notion was now famous, but what did it mean? In Cartier-Bresson’s definition it refers to ‘the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that gives that event its proper expression’.

  The influential critic Clément Chéroux, writing in Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here and Now, explains that the phrase ‘fertile moment’ had already appeared in the preface to another collection of photographs that Cartier-Bresson had taken in India. He also suggests that the term has been overused to describe Cartier-Bresson’s work. While many of his classic shots from the early 1930s are masterpieces of timing (the man jumping over water at Pont de l’Europe, say), only his reportage for Magnum in the late 1940s and ’50s truly merits the description. It certainly doesn’t suit his Surrealist, political or portrait work, and ‘the majority of the late (contemplative) images could have been taken several seconds before or after the moment they were actually shot’.

  And perhaps one man had found the true meaning of the phrase many years before. In the 1860s Edward Muybridge won early acclaim for his magnificent photographs of Yosemite, huge panoramas involving a precise assemblage of multiple glass plates. The vista was huge, and if anything flew or ran while the shutter was open it would appear as a blur or smudge. But then Muybridge found a way to quicken the shutter to such a degree that it seemed he was freezing time. Men would jump and cockatoos would fly and he would catch them in midair. A woman would pour water from a bucket and he’d capture a solid form before it hit the ground.

  His most famous work began in the spring of 1872, when he was 42, precisely 100 years before Nick Ut opened his shutter on the terror of war. Edward Muybridge took a series of photos of a trotting horse named Occident, and the story of the shoot – photographed to settle the question of whether all four legs were off the ground at the same time (they were!) – is one of the most romantic treasures in art (there is no evidence that the question ever became the subject of a wager). Muybridge was tracking locomotion on the minutest scale, the impossible wonder of a mechanical eye perceiving what the human one could not. But the horse had almost been his undoing too.

  These days, it’s not just photographic historians who adore Muybridge, but neurobiologists too, albeit less for his pictures than for his rage and obsessions. His unique vision may have sprung from an artistic temperament born less from patience and skill than from a near-fatal accident. In June 1860, Muybridge, who was then a successful bookseller and bookbinder and had yet to pick up a camera, was due to take a steamer from San Francisco bound for Europe. But he missed his connection, and instead a month later he booked a passage on a stagecoach to Missouri, from where he hoped to take a train to New York and then travel on to Europe. But he had barely reached Texas when the horses bolted and crashed the stagecoach into a tree. At least one passenger died, while Muybridge was thrown out and suffered a serious head injury. Muybridge said he had little recollection of the accident, but during his recovery he noticed that his sense of taste and smell had both deteriorated, and that each of his eyes now detected a slightly different image, causing him to see double. He sought help first in New York and some months later in London, including a consultation with Sir William Gull, a physician to Queen Victoria, who, apart from advising his patient to get as much fresh air as possible, could offer little in the way of explanation or clinical diagnosis.

  But modern brain specialists have a more exacting view of the events. In 2002, a psychology professor from the University of California, Berkeley, named Arthur P. Shimamura, published a report in the journal History of Photography entitled ‘Muybridge in Motion, Travels in Art, Psychology and Neurobiology’. He presented an intriguing thesis: contemporary reports of his accident and its after-effects were consistent with damage to an anterior section of the frontal lobe known as the orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain concerned with creativity, inhibition and expression of emotions. According to Shimamura, evidence from a friend of Muybridge suggested that ‘prior to his accident, Muybridge was a good businessman, genial and pleasant in nature; but after the accident he was irritable, eccentric, a risk-taker and subject to emotional outbursts’. This may have been both good and bad, leading to all sorts of further calamity, as we shall see, but also liberating his perceptive abilities. ‘Shutting off one’s orbitofrontal cortex – from time to time – may actually enhance one’s creative expression.’

  In July 2015 the Journal of Neurosurgery published an article by four clinicians at the Neurological Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, suggesting there may even have been a simple inspiration, conscious or not, for so much of Muybridge’s work to come: ‘Although he had no memories of the days preceding the accident or the event itself, he had a sense of time being stopped and suspended with his near-death experience. He was moving fast and suddenly time stopped.’

  Beyond the obvious symptoms, there are two clues that all may not have been right with the man. The first is that he kept changing his name. He was born Edward Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames, on the south-west fringe of London, in April 1830. He would switch to Muggridge and then Muygridge in the 1850s, before finally settling on Muybridge in the 1860s. Towards the end of his life he also changed his first name to Eadweard (although when he was photographing coffee production in Central America he also briefly became Eduardo Santiago).

  The other notable thing about his personal life is that he killed a man. In 1872, at the age of 42, as his career in California was entering its first full bloom, Muybridge married his 21-year-old studio assistant Flora Shallcross Stone, and their first child, named Florado, arrived two years later. In October 1874 Muybridge discovered that he wasn’t the father. To brighten the time when Muybridge was taking photographs out of town, Flora had occasionally stepped out with a man named Harry Larkyns, described subsequently in the newspapers as ‘gay, dashing and handsome’, which were rarely adjectives passers-by would have applied to her husband. The affair was betrayed by a photograph, possibly one of Muybridge’s own. When, in October 1874, Muybridge visited the home of a midwife to settle a bill he turned over a photograph of what he thought was his child to find the inscription ‘Little Harry’. Muybridge reached for his Smith & Wesson, travelled to the ranch where Larkyns was staying near Napa Valley and greeted him with the phrase ‘I am Muybridge and this is a message from my wife.’ He then shot him.

  In the murder trial that followed, the jury brought home an unexpected verdict: not, as one might have anticipated, of guilty but insane, but of justifiable homici
de. Muybridge was judged to be quite within his rights to kill someone who had made his wife pregnant, and so the photographer skipped out of the courtroom to continue his mission to freeze time. As the psychologist Arthur Shimamura observed, the others in the story fared less well: Flora became ill and died five months after the trial; Florado was shipped off to an orphanage; and Larkyns stayed dead.

  In her exciting book about Muybridge, Rebecca Solnit takes the temperature of society at this time and finds it red hot. ‘The experience of time was itself changing dramatically during Muybridge’s seventy-four years, hardly ever more dramatically than in the 1870s. In that decade the newly invented telephone and phonograph were added to photography, telegraphy and the railroad as instruments for “annihilating time and space” . . . The modern world, the world we live in, began then, and Muybridge helped launch it.’7

  Paradoxically, his most famous photographs enabled us to see familiar things for the first time. Published in 1887, his Animal Locomotion was the culmination of his work over 15 years, 11 volumes in all, with almost 20,000 images arranged on 781 large composite collotype prints. If his photographs weren’t yet considered art they were instantly acclaimed as science: Muybridge demonstrated his work at several leading scientific institutions, including the Royal Academy and Royal Society in London, and the photos on show took the word ‘animal’ in its loosest form, for as well as pictures of horses, baboons, boars and elephants there were children running to their mothers, naked wrestlers, a man throwing a baseball and a woman pretending to smack a child.8 After first using six cameras arranged in a horseshoe to take images of a subject from different angles, he was soon experimenting with a battery of 12 cameras lined up in a row, a wire triggering each shutter release as the subject trotted by. For most of his non-equine studies in Animal Locomotion – a woman climbing stairs carrying a water jug, or two women disrobing – he used cameras fired a fraction of a moment apart by an electrically preset clock.