Page 54 - Studio International - July August 1975

contained an immense stock of imagery 1926 and the 'forties was the development
and stylistic overlays drawn from British of both the cinema and the mass
and foreign art; these could be permuted circulation magazines such as Picture
endlessly according to the need of the Post and Illustrated with their populist
moment. The more critical and immediate thrust, their interest in stories,
the need the more photography was used occupations and life-in-the-streets. Any
as an adaptable medium and return to the idea of a quintessential
painting left in the background. During landscape was not possible, not in its
the Second World War for instance entirety and not in a populist medium
photography was called on to re-affirm like photography: the picturesque
traditional values, and photographers landscape c. 1945 (as projected in a film
such as James Jarche revived many of the such as The Way to the Stars of 1945
pictorial and humorous codes of earlier or in one of the Odhams publications
periods. There was a return in the at the end of the war, such as 'The
photography of Jarche and Bert Hardy British Countryside in Pictures') became
to the rumbustious urban spectacular of a qualified and updated model of the old
the early part of the century, to Sickert's version, maintaining many of its
music-hall iconography and the connotations of an enduring national
muscular comedy of Punch magazine. identity.
Hoppe's Britain of 1926 was The charge most commonly levelled at
re-discovered through photography. British visual, culture is that of 'visual
In July 1940 the traditional landscape illiteracy'. The argument outlined here
was re-presented by Vogue magazine as a runs directly counter to that idea,
rural idyll." Photographed by Rawlings, proposing a highly developed literacy
it was announced as a 'country which amounting to the conversion of the visual
perhaps we have taken for granted, but arts — painting and photography with
now, in snatches of leisure see with their particular styles and imagery — to a
new eyes'. The pressures of war complex coding system, a way of
re-introduced rural England as a signalling allegiances and consuming
revelation: 'New values bring new vision. style, a language rather than a means of
Our present danger illuminates like primary figuration.
lightning the familiar English
landscape, making it vivid, strange and
new'. Picture Post made the same See 'Sir Charles Holmes' by Frank Rutter'
discovery in the same month in a piece The Studio, VOL 102, 1931, pp. 122-131.
headed 'The land we are fighting for'. 2 From an unpublished memoir by Malcolm
Arbuthnot.
With photographs of Kersey, For Hoppe as an engineer of his own
Broadhembury and Wilmcote, the text success see E. 0. Hoppe, Hundred Thousand
read: 'Any moment now, the war may Exposures: The Success of a Photographer,
come to the villages of Britain. The London, 1 945.
villages which are Britain. The villages See Ivor Nicholson, 'An Aspect of British
on whose resistance civilization itself Official Wartime Propaganda', in The
Cornhill Magazine, Vol. LXX, no. 419,
depends'. 2 4
The same image of Britain as a series pp. 593-606.
of village communities in extensive From an address on the 6th May 1925
parkland held through to the end of the published in Stanley Baldwin's On
England, London, 1926, p.130.
war and into the peace, but with one 6 Reproduced on p. 97 in the Royal Academy
major new inflection. Where Hoppe's Illustrated' 1929.
land of 1926 was an unpopulated residue From an unsigned article in The
from history, the setting for what Architectural Review, April 1929, p. 216.
Masterman described as 'historic See Chapter 1, 'King's Thursday' in
monuments of fadeless beauty swinging Decline and Fall, London' 1928.
back the mind through unnumbered Weekend Review, 12th March 1932, p.322.
centuries', the later idyll was peopled, 7° From the editorial 'What is "Modern" ?'
in The Studio, Vol. 96,1928, p.155.
albeit by a folksy cast of thatchers and
bicycling curates. The difference between 11 From 'Sally Bowles' in Christopher
Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, Penguin Ed.
Rawlings 1974, p.63.
Photograph from Vogue 1940 12 See, for instance' a page of CPRE
photographs in The Studio, Vol. 106,
1933, p.153.
11 The Studio, Vol. 98, December 1929,
pp.859-865.
14 Harold Clurman, 'Photographs by Paul
Strand', The Studio, Vol. 98,1929, pp.735-8.
1° From an introduction to 'The Art of the
Camera', The Studio' Vol. 102, 1931, p.163.
11 Quoted by Herbert Read, Paul Nash,
London, 1944, p.12.
11 All Bill Brandt quotations are from his
introduction to Camera in London, London,
1948.
11 Paul Nash, 'Photography and Modern
Art', The Listener, 27th July 1932, p. 130.
11 William Coldstream, 'Painting', from
Art in England, ed. R. S. Lambert, London'
1938,p. 102.
2° From the preface to the catalogue of
Thirty Personalities and a Self-Portrait.
11 From Close Up, September 1931, pp.221-3.
22 Ibid.
23 Vogue magazine, July 1940, p.2 4.
24 Picture Post, 6th July 1940, pp.28-29.
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