There had been a good relationship between the royals and a succession of Jewish photographers, one which seemed to reach beyond professional responsibility and cordiality
April 27, 2016 11:51
ByMichael Berkowitz, Michael Berkowitz
At 11.30am on Tuesday, March 13, 2012, I had an audience, lasting some 45 minutes with the Duke of Edinburgh in his library at Buckingham Palace. I haven't been especially concerned with the monarchy in my professional life, and would not consider myself a keen royal-watcher. It is unusual for an academic with no existing tie to either royalty or "the great and good" of British society to have an in-depth discussion with a member of the royal family. Thousands of people enjoy brief exchanges with the royals, but this was something quite different.
How and why would a historian who has not been accorded an official "honour" be invited for an audience at Buckingham Palace? It was a result of chutzpah, on my part, combined with Prince Philip's willingness to speak about someone he fondly remembers, the photographer known as Baron - Baron Sterling Henry Nahum - who has rarely been discussed since his death in 1956.
At the end of October 2011, I was tidying up an early version of a manuscript on Jews and photography in Britain. Its epilogue dealt with photographers to the Court of St James. Among other topics, I recounted the controversy that arose in 2007 over the Queen's photo-shoot with Annie Leibovitz. Commercials for a BBC-commissioned documentary made it appear that there had been a spat between Leibovitz and Queen Elizabeth II. But the reality was the opposite: they got along splendidly - as shown by Leibowitz's recent engagement to take the photographs marking the Queen's 90th birthday.
My larger point was that there had been a good relationship between the royals and a succession of Jewish photographers, one which seemed to reach beyond professional responsibility and cordiality. I also wrote a few pages about Baron.
I cannot recall when I first heard of him. Possibly it was after I learned that the photographer Snowdon (Antony Armstrong-Jones, first Earl of Snowdon) who had been married to the Queen's younger sister, Princess Margaret, had a partly Jewish background. The path from Snowdon led to Baron, to whom Snowdon had been apprenticed to learn photography. Baron's memoir, Baron by Baron (1957) is explicit about his Jewish origins, and he details his family's history - ranging from North Africa to the United Kingdom and beyond.
Baron asserted that he was close to the royal couple, and especially friendly with Prince Philip. After the Second World War, Baron founded "a little club to lighten the gloom that surrounded us all," meeting once a week above Wheeler's Oyster Bar in Soho. "I think one of the principal reasons for the success of the club was that no speeches were allowed and nobody was permitted to stand up when telling a story," he wrote. A leading member of that informal society was Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, as he then was, whom Baron met during a photo shoot at Broadlands, the home of Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten, in 1947. After finishing with the Mountbattens, Baron snapped a few informal photos of Philip. Baron used his "miniature camera," taking "little more than snapshots without much quality or significance." But "when I look back through all of the photographs I have taken officially and unofficially," he recalled, "the one which I keep on my desk, signed 'Philip, 1947,' taken so casually. . . is the one I like best of all."
A few days after their meeting at the Mountbattens', Prince Philip visited Baron's studio and had lunch with him. According to Baron: "From that time onwards we saw each other frequently… He himself was interested in photography and handled a miniature camera skilfully. Rumours were flying everywhere to the effect that he was engaged to Princess Elizabeth, but his discretion was absolute and unshakable.
"I, who was seeing probably as much of him as any other friend he had, finally learned of the engagement when I read it in the papers."
It stands to reason, then, that the Prince asked Baron to shoot some of the royal wedding photography, also noteworthy because this was to be done in colour.
I wondered: what did the royal couple think about Baron, who died in 1956? I mainly wanted to know if Baron was, indeed, one of his dearest friends and what both the Queen and Prince Philip thought of him. My meeting with Prince Philip, in his library, was surreal. It also was serious. "Why Jews and photography," he immediately challenged me. "Aren't Jews everywhere in the arts and professions?" "So what?"
I attempted to provide a sketch of my thesis concerning the distinctive Jewish role(s) in photography, as related to their socio-economic circumstances. He was wary, but went on with the discussion nevertheless. He seemed to enjoy my willingness to argue.
Prince Philip immediately confirmed that he and Baron had indeed been good friends. He said, though, that he did not recall if he ever knew anything about Baron's background. The Prince then made a very strong point: he took great pains not to know about someone's religion or family origins. He also said that he is introduced to a lot of people who want something of him - and in the end they aren't worth knowing. "Baron wasn't like that," he said.
He was his friend, and while Prince Philip might have been aware that there was some "foreign" element to Baron's background but thought nothing of it.
When I began to research, nearly a decade ago, for an international history of the Jewish engagement with photography, I assumed there was little to say about Britain. Few Jews in the country were important and their Jewishness was negligible. I was ignorant on both counts.
As the work progressed, I found that Jews were so vital in diverse photographic realms in Britain that the subject deserved a book all of its own. Jews were not only contributors but catalytic agents, advancing studio photography and its business practices from the time of photography's inception.
They profoundly shaped what came to be known as photojournalism. They were pioneers in applying photography to the fine arts. They were at the cutting edge of collecting, curatorship, the writing of photographic criticism and history, and photographic publishing. Jews were not necessarily the most revered, talented, or illustrious photographers, but they were prime movers behind nearly all things photographic in Britain until at least the 1970s.
Photography was one of the most open avenues for Jews in Britain to make a living as well as to shape mainstream culture. It's important not to make Jewish self-identification the ontological foundation of Jewish experience and Jewish history. Instead, photography foregrounds Jewish difference as one of a number of analytic categories or frameworks, like gender and class, that not only intersected and overlapped, but also used each others' terms in order to articulate their power.
Jews in photography, no matter their degree of Jewishness, often were integrated in Jewish social networks that proved crucial to the success of their endeavours.
Photography was continuously evolving from the time of its inception, yet we may generalise somewhat about its social character and business dimensions. From the 1850s to the 1950s, if one's picture was snapped for a price, there was a good chance that the person behind the camera was born a Jew.
This was true in Britain and most of continental Europe before 1939, with the possible exceptions of Belgium and France. Compared to almost any other vocation, there was little that stood in a Jewish photographer's way. It was more or less expected that photographers and assistants in a studio, might be Jews, or some other kind of so-called foreigner, possibly Italian, French, Spanish or Armenian. Jews in photography often encouraged ethnic obfuscation by adopting monikers that did not sound so, well, Jewish.
Indistinct or "romantic" origins, and claims of having trained in Paris or Madrid, were thought to be good for business, even if one's clientele was largely Jewish. This is part of the reason why scholars have minimised ethnicity and religious background as factors in the history of photography.
In Britain - as in Continental Europe, North and South America, Australia, and South Africa - Jews were conspicuous in establishing and staffing photography studios, which in turn were geared to the wider population. They also served the needs of their own communities. Although always a minority, there was a smattering of women among them, and Jewish girls and women were especially known for their expertise in "retouching," which was integral to the trade.
Many photographers, however, wished to distance themselves from retouching, which often was derided as grossly manipulative, thereby detracting from the "honesty" of a picture. "Truthfulness" was the watchword of countless photographers, if not the profession overall. The critical phase of retouching, as part of the relationship between sitter and the studio, is not well reflected in the historiography, although it was noted in the training and career paths of scores, if not hundreds, of Jewish photographers.
Could it be that everyone's ancestors were so free of acne, warts, scars and other imperfections? How is it that one hardly ever notices a bride with a "bump"? Jews with cameras on tripods or around their necks enticed customers to have their photos taken in public spaces such as the grounds in front of Buckingham Palace and in Trafalgar Square, and proceeded to sell them prints, postcards, albums, and buttons. Occasionally, they were able to produce these goods on the spot.
Up through the interwar years, Jews photographed the recently deceased, although this was not a standard practice in Judaism. They encouraged the reproduction or enlargement of photographs of the dearly departed. Jews also helped to institutionalise the photographic commemoration of more cheerful life-cycle events, especially weddings. They helped invent the traditions of "class photos" and professional-quality "holiday snaps" in Britain. Because photography was taken, without question, as a heavily Jewish field, Jews participated in government- sponsored photographic expeditions as well as preservation efforts. Jews were also court photographers - officially and surreptitiously, in Britain and elsewhere - from the time of photography's inception. They advanced film and optical technologies, as individual inventors and as employees of major companies such as Kodak and Ilford Limited, both of which were based in north London.
Kodak's stake in radiography, which became vital to the company, was advanced substantially by Nahum Luboschez (1869–1925), a self-educated scientist and chief demonstrator for the firm. A humorous, gentle, and self-effacing polyglot, Luboschez may have been the most important ambassador of photography of all time. Luboschez also was an excellent portraitist who took the best known photograph of none other than George Eastman (1854–1932), the founder of Eastman Kodak. As a photographer of socioeconomic conditions in Russia prior to the First World War, Luboschez was decades ahead of his time.
Beginning in the 1930s, Jewish émigrés from central and east central Europe, in Britain and elsewhere, played roles immensely out of proportion to their numbers in photojournalism, advertising, fashion photography, and sports photography. In these realms there might have been a fair amount of autonomy, depending on the individual's career stage, and how highly she or he was regarded. This is, perhaps, where a kind of Jewish-friendly subjectivity was most manifested - especially on the part of editors and agency heads, such as Stefan Lorant (1901–1997) and Bert Garai (1890–1973), who worked with numerous Jewish and refugee photographers. Lorant has been hailed as "the first major editor of modern photojournalism," and is best remembered as the editor of Picture Post.
In 1933–1934, upon its relocation from Hamburg to London, the Warburg Institute intensively incorporated photography into its work, to an extent greater than any other scholarly institution. Photography became a leading means of connecting to scholars universally, and disseminating the fruits of its research.
The very domains of British "photography publishing" and "photography history"- which came into existence from the 1930s to the 1950s - would have been unimaginable without their progenitors of émigré origin, namely Andor Kraszna-Krausz (1904–1989), Béla Horovitz (1898–1955), Walter Neurath (1903–1967), Hans Juda (1904–1975) and Elsbeth Juda (1911-1914), and Helmut Gernsheim (1913–1995).
But few who write about photography see any reason to comment on the skewed social composition of the field. The sparse attention to Jews who were central to the evolution and fortunes of photography in Britain exists in approximately inverse proportion to the extent to which these men and women affected the country's visual culture. They were so successful that almost nobody noticed.