Let the CAMERA SPEAK By Howard Coster (In an interview)
A room covered with photographs suggests rows of family and school groups and college eights or perhaps a view of the Bay of Naples. But rooms are now being covered with photographs of a very different sort. I have just completed a room of photographic murals. These murals which are twelve feet high tell the story of a famous camera works from the making of the films to the three miles of filing cabinets which ensure the prompt handling of letters. Many firms are realising that the camera can tell the story of their products in a way no letterpress or drawing could achieve. The camera brings conviction and wins our belief. If you see a sketch of a spotless factory you feel the artist has probably idealised the scene. But given a photograph of girls in gleaming caps and overalls with trays of chocolate creams ranged neatly before them you are convinced of the cleanliness of that particular chocolate factory.
Many heavy industry companies who cannot keep suspension bridges or blast furnaces on show in their London office might profit by the use of photographic murals. The camera can do in six months what would take a fresco painter three years and can do it better. Foreign customers with no time to visit works in the North or Midlands could be taken into a room in London
and shown the photographs, life size or larger of every step in the production of the goods in which they are interested. The famous Ford photographic mural is 19 ft. high.
One advantage of the photographic mural over the fresco is that it can always be kept up to date. Single panels may be taken out and replaced by others as machinery and methods change. These murals seem to have a quality of real life about them that many paintings lack. The camera catches the ray of light falling across a workman at his bench, the display of objects before him and the other figures moving in the background, etc. ; details which only the camera can make convincing.
This does not mean however that the mural photographer must not select. Obviously you cannot photograph everything in a factory which extends for several acres. When making my recent mural I spent one week at the factory before taking a single shot. I divided my subject into three sections and tried to photograph the most typical things in each. First came the actual manufacture of the product, then its distribution and finally its use by the public. A giant camera fixed on a trolly was needed in order to have a big enough lens to cover a twelve foot surface. The printing paper measured 12 ft. by 3 ft. 10 in. When finished the photographs were all mounted by hand in huge wooden frames. Once in place the photographs were varnished and are quite permanent. Everything
in these murals is enlarged to two or three times life size. I used 300 films in addition to the photographs I took from the firm’s publicity department, and these had to be enlarged up to the same scale. A mural of this sort takes from three to six months to make and the complete cost is about £400.
People who have hitherto thought of the camera merely as a means of recalling Aunt Jane’s smile are beginning to realise that it is also capable of telling stories of national importance. The Cinema has shown the way. By its aid Russia has made an illiterate population 90 per cent, literate in less than a generation. What the camera might do as a means of national propaganda in this country is yet to be realised. Instead of speeches and pamphlets on housing, or road safety, or education let us have photographs. Imagine one of the large rooms in County Hall fitted up with huge murals, depicting on one side the type of basement room in which so many families of eight or more persons are herded and on the other side the new blocks of flats with their separate bedrooms, their baths and their playgrounds. There would be no more grumbles about increased rates once people had seen such photographs
We all learn more quickly through the eye than in any other way. Photography could make us better citizens, more careful on the roads, more interested in international affairs. Just as the average man believes what he reads in print, so, with rather more justification he believes what he sees in a photograph. Instead of appealing for boys’ clubs and nursery schools and hospitals by means of fanciful placards depicting torch bearers, storks carrying infants, and horns of plenty, give us photographs of a school leaver of fourteen selling matches, toddlers playing in the gutter, a queue in the outpatients’ department. Most of us have very little imagination. When we are told either in print or line that the school leavers are the torch bearers of England’s youth, it means exactly nothing. But we could all understand that photograph of a real kid, selling matches.
A few hanks of wool, samples of pickled peaches and piles of sponges give very little idea of what life is like in a crown colony. Yet this, supplemented by a few small models and portrait size photographs, is all that most of the colonial “ houses ” in London have to show us. Imagine how much more thrilling would be a gigantic mural of sheepshearing, fruit growing, fishing and all the other activities. A man who laughed at pamphlets as “ a lot of lies ” would find conviction here. The camera had seen these things — therefore however clever, selective and tricky the photographer, these things must at least exist. Such a display would be more convincing than the brightest posters of the Empire Marketing Board. It would have the vividness of that Dutch painter who used to sign his pictures: “ I Jan Van Eyke was here in ...”
