This portentously titled six-part series was first broadcast in 2007 and watching it again online I was struck by the same irritation that I felt the first time around. Let’s get one thing straight – photography has no history, at least not as it is conceived of here, a narrative suspiciously akin to the one that was invented for the Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski. You might say of course that expecting a television documentary to cover the infinitely complex development of a whole medium is asking a bit too much, but the producers have taken every occasion to frame it that way and numerous establishment figures line up in support. We can plainly see how easy it is for received wisdom – downright cliché in this case – to become an orthodox value, the idea being that photography itself possesses some kind of native “genius” that is manifested in pictures. Now that may well be the case (and I think, to an extent, it actually is), but an explicitly modernist notion of progress built in to the story means that whole sections of the medium’s past are only allowed to function in terms of how we arrived at the kind of practice understood to be “essentially” photographic. Such an approach creates a false hierarchy that gives undue privilege to certain aspects of photography at the expense of other – equally valid – ways of thinking about what it can do. See for example the near disastrous contribution from Peter Galassi, who dismisses the early pictorialist photographers – with just the proper hint of masculine disdain – as “self-appointed elites” who tried to pervert the course of “real” photography with their artistic indulgences. Of course, this is the version of photographic history most suited to the format of the programs and in a sense it is understandably weighted towards those that best fit its agenda. Even so, there are some puzzling omissions; where, for example, are photographers of such considerable influence as Anders Petersen, or Daido Moriyama? For all that the series is still quite enjoyable and even a worthwhile guide to some (if only some) of the key issues. There remains the pleasure of watching photographers at work – Nan Goldin is a treat, as is the touching conversation between Larry Sultan and his father. But why this particularly flawed narrative is still so often favoured in a wider context is hard to fathom, or indeed justify.
The Genius of Photography now has its own YouTube channel so you can view the whole thing and make up your own mind.
