PBS’ ‘Images’ Freeze-Frames a Century

Beam us down, Scotty.

The concept of zooming through time--romantic conjecture popularized by novelist H.G. Wells and recycled endlessly in subsequent science fiction--embarked Tuesday night on the PBS series “Nova.” And some grand travelogue of hypotheticals it was, as noted scientists from Kip Thorne to Stephen Hawking debated the prospects of commuting from one age to another through a theoretical tunnel in the fabric of space and time known as a wormhole.

New century, old dreams.

That tunnel metaphor is not exclusive to the laws of physics, though, for photography--even that of klutzy shutterbugs--is also a wormhole through which time tourists cross from one galaxy of human experience to another.

Evidence arrives tonight in “American Photography: A Century of Images.”

What a century. What images, too, a crisp, swift three hours worth that memorialize moments in time that unite us with our environment and prior selves as a nation. Just as this program merges the strong storytelling of writer-producer Ronald Blumer and producer-directors Muffie Meyer and Ellen Hovde, a trio whose earlier collaboration yielded another fine PBS effort, “Liberty! The American Revolution.”

As for tonight, three hours is hardly adequate to flip through this bulging Rolodex of visual history. Listen as Merry Foresta, senior curator for photography at the National Museum of Modern Art, celebrates topography and Ansel Adams, the photographer who captured it so stunningly on film:

“The landscape in America has a great history and legacy to it. It was our cathedrals. It was our castles. In response to a European idea of what art should be about, [it was] something spiritual, something lofty, something historical. Our history was in our waterfalls, in our mountains, in our great rivers.”

At that point, you want much more. Yet this inviting capsule is the extent of it. What is on the screen--the good, the bad and the plenty ugly--is quite powerful, though.

It begins at the turn of the century, more than six decades after the advent of photography as we now know it. And what goes around comes around almost immediately, as the advent of the cheap Brownie camera makes nearly everyone a photographer for only a buck.

Just as the modern camcorder has extended to multitudes of amateurs an opportunity to record a videotape history ranging from revolutions abroad to Rodney King’s savage beating by L.A. cops. Will that be what Americans in the next millennium see as this generation’s signature freeze frame? Or will it be televised car chases? Or obsessions with sensational crime, celebrities and the private lives of public figures?

If the latter, it will affirm that our time journey as a society has stalled in a cultural wormhole, for on the screen tonight are front pages of tabloids beginning with the granddaddy of the sleazy bunch in 1919, the Illustrated Daily News.

That rag was to become the New York Daily News, which at one point slipped into the execution of convicted murderer Ruth Snyder a photographer whose picture of her in the chair through a window was printed under the banner headline “DEAD.” Proving that today’s Fox programmers didn’t invent the gross and tasteless.

Nor are media reenactments or digital doctoring strictly ‘90s concepts, evidenced tonight by the composigraphs--staged photos assembled by attaching celebrity heads to other bodies--pioneered by New York’s Evening Graphic in the 1920s. One of the most outrageous of these was printed after the 1926 death of revered silent film star Rudolph Valentino, showing him in heaven with the equally dead Enrico Caruso, under the banner: “Rudy Meets Caruso: Tenor’s Spirit Speaks!”

Did as many people believe that as believed Cokie Roberts a few years ago when she claimed on ABC News to be reporting from the White House, after which it was revealed that she had been in a studio and, through technology, seamlessly inserted into a White House background?

Crossing one ethical line makes crossing the next one that much easier. In that regard, the camera’s potential to manipulate and be manipulated is something to keep in mind while hearing tonight of the role of photography in government-driven propaganda.

On this occasion, the time machine erases the gap between censorship in the 1991 Gulf War and President Wilson deploying the camera as a weapon to rally the nation behind the U.S. war effort through “positive” coverage in 1917. With newspapers and magazines forbidden to show pictures of Allied dead, unseen by Americans were the war’s gray, bleak landscape of aborted lives and “young faces bleared with blood, sucked down into the mud” described by British poet Sigfried Sassoon.

Thus, the omission can be the message. As someone says tonight, even a straight photo “is only a version of the truth.” That’s so, because still photographs are as selective as TV pictures, potentially misleading the viewer by isolating an experience and excluding the universe existing just beyond.

How interesting, then, to see tonight a bit of the Museum of Modern Art’s famed “Family of Modern Man” exhibition in 1955, a glorious feel-good panorama from the world’s greatest shooters whose individual photos are so joyous and celebratory that they move you to tears. Yet collectively they project a world that is not quite real.

Even more prominent here, though, is the camera as a vehicle for social change. Cut to shrill street music and a different set of photos from William Klein, Robert Frank and others that say this is your world. Among them is the shocking 1955 picture of Emmett Till, the black teenager who was murdered in Mississippi after being accused of whistling at a white woman, the image of his swollen face outraging a generation of black Southerners who became active in the civil rights movement.

It’s true, as we’re told here, that the still photo speaks uniquely to both the heart and the brain. But why?

You see tonight a Life magazine spread showing faces of “One Week’s Dead” in Vietnam, not the “eyeless dead” that haunted Sassoon, but eyes now attached to statistics. You see photos of human cadavers, the lucky living dead who survived Auschwitz, as well as a flatbed on which corpses of other Holocaust victims are stacked like lumber. You see a Depression-era father and his two children approach their shelter in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. And somewhere in the South, in the 1950s, are two adjacent water fountains, a large one labeled “whites” and a tiny one wedged into a corner labeled “colored.”

Then, the epiphany. On television, someone is always telling you what to think of pictures. With a still photo, though, you get only what you see. No voice-over needed . . . or wanted.

* “American Photography: A Century of Images” airs tonight at 8 on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV.