Timekeepers

by Simon Garfield

  The whole project was sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, whose interest was sparked by the possibility of obtaining photographs for medical training – or, as one correspondent put it, to show ‘the walk of diseased people, paralytics etc’.9 The enterprise was also open to individual supporters, and those who subscribed early were offered a chance to deliver an animal of their choosing to be photographed at Muybridge’s studio. It’s unknown how many guest animals turned up, but the most commonly featured subject in Muybridge’s photographs is Muybridge himself, often naked, engaged in activities ranging from sitting down and sprinkling water to ‘stooping for cup and drinking’. He has a lean body, a long pointed white beard and a sense of exhibitionism that viewers may feel extends beyond scientific exploration into rampant narcissism.

  The photography historian Marta Braun has written that Muybridge’s motion studies are not always what they appear to be. Occasionally the photos are presented out of sequence, and often they have been treated in some way – cropped, enlarged, and pieced together ‘into deceptively cohesive patterns . . . Animal Locomotion is a project whose every element had been subject to manipulation of one kind or another.’ In attempting to make or confirm a point, Muybridge has presented the viewer with a different image to the one seen by the camera, a benign fraud (and a certain suggestion, very early on, that if the camera doesn’t lie, the photographer often will). Just as it purports to reveal a moment of true life, the darkroom instead offers distortion. He cropped and enlarged and edited in the tradition of all classic storytelling. If you are looking for the beginning of the fantastical and unreliable world that is American film-making – in fact all film-making – you will find it here.

  Muybridge displayed his photos on an object he called the zoopraxiscope, a wooden box projecting an illuminated spinning glass plate. It was a revolving magic lantern able to trick the eye. Muybridge meticulously placed his motion studies sequentially on the plate (initially as painted silhouettes and line drawings), creating the impression of movement when the disc spun at speed. It was a primitive movie projector, and it made the world’s head spin too. Muybridge referred to one of the earliest versions of his invention as ‘a scientific toy’, but it turned out to be rather more than that: his photographs dissected time, and then his machine reassembled it.10 Muybridge also patented a new, quicker shutter system, and his ability to capture a fraction of a second in time would soon, for the price of a camera, be available to all. But a faster shutter speed could only help you so much: you still had to be there to click the button at the perfect moment, and you still had to be a talented soul to make art. This held true whether you were Muybridge in California, Cartier-Bresson in Paris or David Burnett on a highway not far from Saigon.

  David Burnett was the man who didn’t get the picture. He was working in Vietnam for Time, Life and the New York Times, and he was standing right by Nick Ut at about noon on 8 June 1972 when Kim Phúc and her family ran by. Unfortunately, he was one of the two photographers loading his film at the time. As he explained in the Washington Post magazine in 2012, on the 40th anniversary of the event, those born into the era of digital photography might find it hard to understand what operating a film camera was like, ‘that there was, necessarily, a moment when your finite film would end at frame 36, and you would have to swap out the shot film for a fresh roll before being able to resume the hunt for a picture’.

  The hunt for a picture – surely something Cartier-Bresson would have understood, as if the perfect photo was out there in the wilds somewhere, and you just had to find it. And in those other brief moments, when you were changing a film, Burnett knew that ‘there was always the possibility of the picture taking place. You would try to anticipate what was happening in front of your eyes, and avoid being out of film at some key intersection of time and place . . . there are plenty of stories about those missed pictures.’

  On that particular day and time, Burnett was changing film in one of his Leicas, which he remembers as ‘an amazing camera with a reputation for being infamously difficult to load’. He saw the plane come in with the napalm, and then faint images of people running through the smoke. As he was still fumbling with his camera, he saw Nick Ut put his viewfinder to his eye. ‘In one moment . . . he captured an image that would transcend politics and history and become emblematic of the horrors of war visited on the innocent. When a photograph is just right, it captures all those elements of time and emotion in an indelible way.’ Not long afterwards, but too long afterwards, Burnett had reloaded his film and he remembers Ut and his driver taking the kids to the hospital. When he next met up with Ut at the AP office a couple of hours later he remembers Ut stepping out of the darkroom holding a still wet print of his picture.

  When he reflects on that day now, Burnett’s clearest memory is ‘the sight, out of the corner of my eye, of Nick and another reporter beginning their run toward the oncoming children’. This was a new picture: Ut actually running towards the children. Burnett says he often thinks of that day and how unlikely it was that one picture from a relatively minor skirmish became one of the most important images from any war. ‘For those of us who carry our cameras along the sidewalk of history for a living, it is comforting to know that even in today’s digitally overloaded world, a single photograph, whether our own or someone else’s, can still tell a story that rises above language, locale and time itself.’

  _______________

  1 When Ut’s photo is printed at full frame, which it originally wasn’t, the large figure to the right of the frame is clearly another photographer struggling to reload.

  2 Ut’s image wouldn’t be the only, or first, great photograph from Vietnam. Other ‘marmalade droppers’ (so-called because their impact causes the morning newspaper reader to mishandle their toast) included Eddie Adams’ photograph from 1968 of a Viet Cong suspect being shot in the street at the beginning of the Tet Offensive (another photo which won a Pulitzer), and the photograph by Malcolm Browne from 1963 of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc engulfed in petrol flames in protest against the repressive US-backed regime of Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem. (If you ever need an example of how war photographers tend to think differently from you and me, how about this: shortly before his death at the age of 81, Browne was asked by Time magazine in 2012 what he was thinking when he looked through his viewfinder at the burning monk. He replied, ‘I was thinking only about the fact it was a self-illuminated subject that required an exposure of about, oh say, f10 or whatever it was.’)

  The preponderance and impact of single images – the fraction of a second that outlives a generation – was one reason why Vietnam became the last American war in which those in authority allowed the press to roam and report freely. In future, accredited reporters would be obliged to be embedded with the military. Too often, of course, ‘embed’ is another word for ‘control’.

  3 On 8 June 2007, for example, 35 years to the day since he photographed Kim Phúc, he was on assignment to photograph Paris Hilton at a court appearance. ‘Two tearful girls in the throes of terror,’ the New York Daily News noted as it reported on the coincidence. ‘Nobody cried for Paris Hilton,’ Ut said wisely, ‘but everybody cried for Kim Phúc’.

  4 When I met Ut in Wetzlar, the camera around his neck was a newish digital model, with a shutter speed of up to 1/4000th of a second. The M2 model he used in June 1972 could shoot up to 1/1000th of a second.

  5 For more on Kim Phúc’s life story see cbsnews.com/news/the-girl-in-the-picture. See also ‘How the Picture Reached the World’ by Horst Faas and Marianne Fulton on digitaljournalist.org, and ‘Remembering Vietnam’ on vanityfair.com, 3 April 2015.

  6 In 1958, Georges Braque had given him the inspirational book Zen in the Art of Archery, an early form of questing spiritual mindfulness first published in Germany many years before Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  7 River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Viking, 2003).

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sp; 8 His achievements would find echoes not only in photography and film-making, but in many other realms of science and art: Edgar Degas, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, Sol LeWitt and Philip Glass have all acknowledged an artistic debt.

  9 Muybridge had fallen out with the sponsor of his first photos of equine locomotion, Leland Stanford, the former governor of California. (Stanford owned Occident and other horses photographed by Muybridge in the 1870s.) Stanford had made his money from the railroads, and when he wasn’t racing horses he directed much of his wealth to philanthropic causes: part of Stanford University now stands on the site of the Palo Alto farm at which Muybridge conducted many of his horse studies. More far-sighted biographers of Muybridge have thus made a direct link between the pioneering technology of his photos and Silicon Valley.

  10 Several pieces of Muybridge’s equipment, as well as his scrapbooks and more than 150 of his Animal Locomotion prints, may be seen at a permanent exhibition near his birthplace at the Kingston Museum. He returned to England in the 1890s and died in 1904, and on his gravestone they got his name wrong: Maybridge.

  Car plant circa 1930: a driver in Germany awaits his airbag.

  Chapter Ten

  The Day Shift

  i) We Will Crush, Squash, Slaughter Yamaha!

  A few years ago I decided to learn how to make a car. The Mini was approaching its fiftieth birthday, and I was in the middle of writing about its turbulent history when I realised I couldn’t hope to understand the production process unless I became a part of it. So at 6.15 a.m. one Monday in November 2008, I drove to the BMW plant at Cowley, on the outskirts of Oxford, where the Mini is made, and entered the security gates with dread in my heart.

  It was still dark, and it was my first day of basic training. There were two other men on my course, and both had some experience of making cars. I had no experience of making cars and could barely manage to add air to my tyres on a forecourt. I was told I would be thrown in at the deep end, and it would be physically exhausting, but I probably wouldn’t have too much trouble mastering the actual procedure if I followed simple instructions. The most important of which were to a) take pride in my work, b) not slow down the production line, and c) not do anything wrong that might result in a court case. The worst thing would be to do something wrong and not tell anyone about it.

  My training – which was not specifically designated as a test of my aptitude but clearly was – involved working on two of the car’s most critical components. The first entailed bolting on the rear subframe to ensure that the wheels and rear brakes wouldn’t suddenly surprise a driver one day by falling off into the road, and the second entailed securing the electrical connections for the airbag control box, which, if secured correctly, would prevent the driver and passenger flying through the windscreen in the event of a collision (and if not, wouldn’t). Mike Colley, the vehicle assembly manager, began his instruction with the news that the plant contained a quiet room, situated very close to the training room, ‘should you want to go and pray’. He explained the basic layout of the plant and then projected a slide on the screen behind him. ‘These are some scrivets found left in a car.’ (The picture showed some small secure fasteners, nominally a cross between a screw and a rivet but really more like a screw and a Rawlplug). ‘OK, they wouldn’t make a lot of noise; however, if you’ve just spent £20,000 on a brand-new vehicle, the first thing you’re going to do is have a good look around it to see where everything goes and what sort of space you’ve got. If you lift up the boot and the little panel where the toolkit is, and you find a couple of scrivets there, you’re not going to be best pleased.’ I felt that scrivets would be the least of my problems, and I was sure that any purchaser of a car in which I had fitted the airbag control panel would feel the same.

  Colley said that as with most production lines, the key elements were safety, efficiency, accuracy and production flow: a successful day was one in which everyone employed on the production line would deliver precisely what was required of them in precisely the time allotted. Every piece of welding and bolting and installation of, say, the window electrics, had to be delivered in the tiny window before the next bit of welding and bolting and installation passed to the worker waiting a few metres up the line. Everyone would have their own responsibilities, and if everyone lived up to the standards expected of them a car would roll off the production line every 68 seconds.

  Unless someone pressed one of the stop buttons. An ‘andon’ button, named after the Japanese word for lantern, was situated on a pillar every ten or fifteen feet down the line. The button halted production and sent a siren to the manager’s office indicating that someone wanted help. ‘They will come down the line, see the light and say, “Andon! Andon!” and you will say, “Yes, I couldn’t get that bolt on,” or whatever.’

  The problems with stopped time on a production line were obvious: a reduction in efficiency and income, and an increase in stress for those charged with keeping things moving. Ian Cummings, a process improvement manager, told me that the stress made him think that he had the hardest job he could imagine anyone doing. Even on a day when no one pressed the stop buttons, success relied ‘on other people all coming to work at the right time and in the right frame of mind’. Sometimes Cummings wished that people could be more like machines; the problem with staff was that they introduced variability into the process. Absenteeism put a big spanner in the works, or rather didn’t, and not everyone was punctual. A three-minute warning buzzer sounded at the start of every shift, after which the line would begin to roll. You were permitted to leave the plant to visit Tesco or Burger King on your lunch or dinner break, but if you weren’t back on time, ‘It’s no good saying, “The queue was massive and I was starving”, because the line will start without you and you will miss five or so cars.’

  When the first Mini was sold in 1959, no one – not even its egomaniacal designer Alec Issigonis – would have dared suggest the car would last 50 years or become such a global success. No one used the word ‘icon’ outside the walls of a church. The twenty-first century Mini (strictly a MINI, to distinguish it from its predecessor the Mini) is a very different car to the one that became one of the great British symbols of the 1960s (it’s now owned by BMW for a start), but even in its pumped-up, heftily priced modern state it is a product that is clearly doing something right; it was in tune with the times then, and a combination of skilful engineering and marketing ensured that it was in tune with the times now. On the day I turned up for training, 53 new cars really were coming off the production line every hour, an extraordinary thing for such a complex bit of machinery, not least because each car had a highly customised order sheet that had been drawn up by a purchaser in a showroom only about eight weeks before. About 800 cars were completed each weekday, and because of the immense choice of alloy wheels and wing mirrors and roof decals and a hundred other options, it could take a great many days before the build sheet of any two consecutive cars on the production line was identical. As a customer, there was only one option you couldn’t choose: the option that someone like me wouldn’t be given responsibility for the installation of your rear brakes.

  A man named Richard Clay, the vehicle assembly manager, turned up to provide guidance on bolting on the rear subframe. This was lifted onto the car by robot, and it was our job to fit the lateral arms and the anti-roll bar. ‘You have sixty-eight seconds to do your process.’ The other two trainees sighed a little, as if they could do the task and still have time to go shopping. ‘If any of these fixings were not secured correctly it would leave the car unfit to drive or render it immobile,’ Clay said. ‘This could lead to serious injury or loss of life and damage to corporate image. And these things could lead on to court cases. It’s all bad things.’

  Assembly involved the complex but highly regulated process of scanning and tooling known as IPSQ – International Production System Quality. Every car has a programmable and traceable electronic history, with barcode scanning that checks every new sta
ge in the build process. As the car progresses along the line, a system known as DC tooling checks that the fixings are correct in their torque measurements and signs it off for that part of the build. The strength of critical fixings is measured in newton metres – with about 150 newton metres required for the subframe but only perhaps 2 for an airbag crash sensor. ‘Don’t let go of the trigger too early,’ Richard Clay said. ‘Put this bit over the roll bar, locate the stabilisers, sit the bolt here on the lower arm – it’s easier if you hold it into your body, make sure it bites. And then just the same on the other side.’

  The first job we were required to do was to scan a vehicle’s personal identification number (VIN) on or below the bonnet. At the end of the line, all the processes are stored in the computer, and so if something is wrong they know what to fix in the rework areas. In common with most factory production systems, Mini operates on the principle that everything should be ‘right first time’. There was one further piece of advice: ‘Please do not use the scanners as hammers. They cost £400 each and £150 for the batteries. If you’re on a process that needs something pushed in, please ask for a little mallet that will be provided to you.’

  After the rear subframe work we moved to the other end of the room where there was a bench with electrical connections – the airbag sensors.

  ‘We will time you on this,’ Clay said, ‘but it’s not a question of pass or fail. It’s to show you that the task has to be performed at a certain speed on the line and you can’t just clown around. A non-connected connector can cause a rework of half a day just to find the loose connection, and the whole car has got to be stripped and everything taken out. So if you can’t make your connection properly at the start, make sure you tell somebody. And please keep all the lubricants away from the electrics – they do not mix.’