London: captured on camera for 180 years

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London: Portrait of a City

By Reuel Golden et al. captions by Barry Miles

London will never go out of fashion as a subject for a photographic survey, and this one is very much better than most: highly selective in its illustrations, lucid in its supporting text, and thus both invitingly accessible and persuasively thought provoking. If a book could be an exhibition, complete with captions, this would be a good contender.

Golden’s presiding guidance over a hot-shot bunch of researchers has resulted in a totally up-to-date, 2012 production that fully complements its immediate playmates in the post-Olympic circus: 120 photographers represented, plus a huge range of anonymous plates, and not only an astute bibliography but recommended films and listening (although everyone will question that list). Julien Temple’s new film London – a Modern Babylon (essential viewing with or without this book) and Tate’s exhibition Another London (both 2012) inhabit the same territories, and enhance and expand London’s static presence, its text, and its weight.

It is excellent value for its size, and because Goulden’s urbane text is presented tri-lingually, it should find a ready European audience. Each of the book’s sections is prefaced by short, readable, reflective survey essays; easy overtures to the magnetism exercised by so many remarkable images. And, once again, the anonymous photographers are so often those who create the most absorbing statements.

With or without its sound supporting bibliography as a springboard for further research, London absorbs the better part of 180 years of photography in Britain (but by no means always by Brits), and though it will have had to be economical, it has been fairly and judiciously selected. Of the named photographers, some will be unknown to today’s audiences, but those icons you’d expect to be present  do take a curtain call or two. A miniature list includes Snowdon, Eve Arnold, David Bailey, Cecil Beaton, Werner Bischof and Bill Brandt, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Anton Corbijn, Terence Donovan, Roger Fenton, Frank Horvat, Johnnie Shand Kidd and Linda McCartney, Don McCullin, the wonderful Roger Mayne, Norman Parkinson and Martin Parr; Tony Ray Jones, Mick Rock, Fox Talbot, and Wolfgang Tillmans. That said, they aren’t always represented by their most familiar images, and this is a welcome departure, levelling the illustrative content with the anonymous work, and creating much greater interest.

One of the best qualities of London is that its planning and construction have clearly been so careful. Its supporting lists aside, readers will remain much the richer because someone a century ago was awake enough to stare down the viewfinder at the right moment and do the business, and not always from a ‘British’ standpoint.And oh, how well the business is so often done through the eye of a European outsider. Elsewhere, superb anonymous plates do much to illustrate London’s history, as well as the history of photography.

Because this is a Taschen publication, it’s a fair bet that it will confront you in a bookshop before Christmas, but, by the same token, it isn’t a book to be ignored. Visually, and, on the whole, analytically, it does much to cement awareness of the range of photographic representations of the largest city in Europe within the epoch in which photographic development was at its height, and the introductions to each section generally work well. They are suitably wide-ranging (they could hardly be other in some circumstances), but their considered tone is positive when they might just as easily be vapid and trite.

It isn’t easy to write for this sort of book in the modern world, and Golden does well, most especially with the last section, where the breadth of available imagery can only have been breathtaking. Here, the concept of ‘choice’ has been more than appropriately applied. Indeed, the sections dealing with London’s post-war life are particularly strong, and in these the use by the publisher of colour prints, or of tinted images, are important to the book’s overall presentation. If there is any issue with the book it is here, in its failure to remark on technical innovation, and on the use of new chemical technologies, as these related to film. A failure to explain the presence of tinting, or, conversely, the emergence of real colour film for commercial use, is a notable omission. Someone will want to know.

London’s large format is a true aid to vision: were the book any smaller and it would have been a failure.Its chronology begins in 1837, and the four consecutive sections (1902–38; 1939–59; 1960–81; and1982 to the present) offer an astonishing range of images of the city, largely responsive to the situations and conditions in which they were taken, but, of equal importance, responsive to a range of social states: in these they both support and are observant, of sports, politics, warfare and the social climate itself – and so much more. This may be Taschen’s book of the year. See for yourself.

London: Portrait of a City  by Reuel Golden and others with captions by Barry Miles is published by Taschen, 2012. 552 pp, copiously illustrated in mono and colour, £44.99 hardback. ISBN 978-3-83652877-1