Frank Hurley: The Man Who Made History is a documentary that tells the life story of a man who's famed for being the official photographer on Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated trip to Antartica in 1914 (ending sometime later). South was the result of his filming, but even more spectacular than that was his photography including dramatic pictures of Endurance trapped in the ice, and Shackleton setting off for help.
He went on to photograph the Western Front in the First World War, before exploring New Guinea, having a go at making fiction films and returning to the frontlines for the Second World Wars.
What I hadn't known before I read this book was that Hurley was not just a master photographer, but he was a master in the darkroom, and was making montages in an age that far pre-dated Photoshop. He would happily "improve" his photos by adding more dramatic skies, or merging more than one photo to suit his purpose. To him photography was less a record of actualité than an art form of its own.
And this gained him quite a lot of criticism, much of which remains today. He wasn't telling the truth. He used other photographs to represent what he wanted. He restaged events to capture the epic quality of the story he wanted to tell. Some in the documentary even criticised him for painting too rosy a picture of his home nation of Australia in his later years.
This criticism seemed unfair to me. Journalistically some of these practices might be considered dubious, although in an age when we routinely doctor digital imagery, it seems unfair that we hold him up to such high standards. And so what if he was effectively painting a "chocolate box" portrait of his country?
I wonder if this is all because he's possibly the most famous Australian photographer of his age, and it's be the equivalent of discovering that, say, Eamonn McCabe regularly faked many of his photos. Considering that he was basically making up documentary film making as he went along, the fact that he didn't quite meet our current day journalistic standards is the same as wishing some of our heroes of yesteryear had not condemned racism or slavery.
Posted by adambowie at November 15, 2004 11:53 PM