Stefan Lorant and Picture Post

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE The Eyes of Democracy: Stefan Lorant and Picture Post Yumiko FUKUNISHI Summary Modern photojournalism was born in Weimer Germany and refugee photojour- nalists (photo reporters and photo editors) imported this innovative media into 1930s Britain. British photojournalism can be regarded as one of the most important media offering a new perspective on the representation of working class or British ‘others’ to the people who shared the ‘democratic’ culture of 1930s Britain. In this paper I will show what were the politics of British photojournalism, partic- ularly Stefan Lorant’s Picture Post, from its founding in 1938, as manifested in word and image, in its editorial outlook and in its presentation of the surrounding world. Documentary photography, which was constructed by Picture Post, visually developed a rhetoric of the ‘ordinary’, which was part of the documentary mode as a whole in 1930s Britain. Within this rhetoric, there was a focus on ordinary people and their daily realities as a subject worthy of observation and atten- tion. Keywords Stefan Lorant (1901-1997), Photojournalism, Journalism, Hungary, Germany, Great Britain ‘In periods of rapid social change’, A.C.H. Smith maintains, ‘the press per- forms a significant role as a social educator . By its selectivity, emphasis, treatment and presentation, the press interprets [the] process of social change.’1 ） If, as Smith contends, the press educates its readers as it enter- tains and informs them, Picture Post’s most important political and social ― 245 ― function consisted in its weekly examination of the various cultural and social activities of Britain during the Slump and World War Two. In this paper, however, I will look only at the pre-war years of Picture Post, for I want to focus on the strategies of persuasion which documentary developed for an in- ternal audience before the advent of the war turned it into a medium for pro- jecting propaganda to the rest of the world. In other words, I think it can be shown that prior to the war, documentary images directed arguments to the British people about how they should see themselves and their community. Susan Sontag stresses the role of the photograph in ‘the didactic cultivation of perception, independent of notions about what is worth perceiving’. Ac- cording to her, cameras did not simply make it possible to comprehend more by seeing. They changed seeing itself by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing’s sake.2 ） These visual presentations addressed the problems of how to see and how to be seen in a period of epistemological and social flux in which, as George Orwell says, ‘None of the old classifications will fit’.3 ） I will look at British documentary photography via Picture Post as a framework for working out problems of identity, knowledge, and community in the 1930s. Firstly, I will examine the introduction of photojournalism to Britain by Ste- fan Lorant. Secondly, I will show how he, as the chief editor of Picture Post, tried to instruct its audience for one thing how to recognize documentary as distinct from other forms of representation, and for another how to recog- nise a new political and social vision for the nation around the idea of ‘ordinary English people’ using a strategy of visual inclusiveness. In doing so, Picture Post was inventing a kind of ‘family album’ for England. ― 246 ― The Eyes of Democracy [1] Stefan Lorant in Weimer Germany 1. Lorant as a creative editor Born in Budapest in 1901, Stefan Lorant came from a Hungarian Jewish middle-class family. His father, as a young man, worked in newspapers and after his marriage he became manager of Erdélyi, the prominent photo- graphic studio in Budapest which catered for the royal family and the aris- tocracy. With the surrender of the Hungarian government to fascism in 1919, Lorant left for Czechoslovakia. There he was helped by Franz Kafka to find a job playing the violin in a movie house orchestra. Before long, he moved to Vienna and began work as a stills photographer for a Hungarian filmmaker. During the day he made photographs in the studio and at night he studied the intricacies of the movie camera. At 19 years of age, Lorant became known as a leading cameraman in Europe with his first film, The Life of Mo- zart. Over the next few years, he developed skills as a scriptwriter and direc- tor as well, and made a total of 14 films between Vienna and Berlin. In 1925, Lorant left filmmaking and began a career in journalism by writ- ing articles for various newspapers in Berlin. Appointed chief editor of a Mu- nich weekly in 1928, he was responsible for creating the Münchner Illustri- erte Presse. Under his editorship the paper became the first modern photojournalistic paper in the world, with a weekly circulation of 750,000. When the Nazis invaded Bavaria in 1933, Lorant’s political commentaries en- raged Hitler, who ordered him to be taken into ‘protective custody.’ No reason was given for his imprisonment. Perhaps the reason was that Münchner Illustrierte Presse was the most serious rival in Bavaria to Hitler’s Völkischer Baobachter.4 ） Six and a half months later, the Hungarian government suc- ― 247 ― ceeded in obtaining his release and he returned to Budapest, where he began editing the Sunday supplement of Pesti Napló, the city’s leading newspa- per. Based on his prison experience, Lorant wrote I Was Hitler’s Prisoner and when it was ready for publication by the spring of 1934, Lorant left Budapest for London.5 ） One reason why he chose Britain was to find an English pub- lisher. Another reason was, as we shall discuss later, his personal longing for and trust in this country. Consequently, first published in April 1935, I Was Hitler’s Prisoner was serialised in the late 1930s in the Sunday Express and the News Chronicle; called ‘the most moving book that has come out of Nazi Germany’, and with the claim that ‘his book will live longer than Hitler’s Ger- many’,6 ） it had record sales as a Penguin Special in 1939.7 ） By then, of course, Lorant was also the editor of one of the most popular and innovative picture weeklies in Britain, Picture Post. 2. Münchner Illustrierte Presse A short examination of Münchner Illustrierte Presse is useful to the study of Picture Post and its place in Britain. Stefan Lorant was chief editor of Münchner Illustrierte Presse from 1930 to 1933; Picture Post’s principal pho- tographers, Hans Bauman (Felix H. Man) and Kurt Hubschmann (Kurt Hut- ton) learned their craft at the Münchner Illustrierte Presse and other Weimar ‘Illustrierten’. There are direct stylistic links as well. In Picture Post, the for- mat, variously titled ‘photo-story’, ‘photo-series’ or ‘photo-essay’ (a se- quence of photographs which tell a story visually and are accompanied by a minimum of explanatory text), first explored by Lorant and others in the ‘Il- lustrierten’, is finally perfected. A communality of theme, of story ideas, also relates the illustrated magazines of Weimar in the 1920s and Picture Post in ― 248 ― The Eyes of Democracy the late 1930s and 1940s; many of the photo-essays which appeared in Pic- ture Post are re-workings of Weimar photo-essays in more sophisticated, i.e. more purely visual, form.8 ） The social and political function of the illustrated magazine is significant. One conception of the illustrated magazine as a social and political commen- tary is evident in the range of Weimar ‘Illustrierten’ during the ‘golden age of photojournalism’, 1926-1933. This, by far the most prevalent, is the con- cept of the apolitical mass-circulation urban weekly, such as the Münchner Illustrierte Presse and the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung. Avoiding all but the most banal of political stands, this brand of illustrated magazine presented its readers with a glittering, fast-paced world, a world of nightclubs, theatre openings, fashion, bicycle races, celebrities and exotica. Representing a middle-class fantasy world of entertainment, consumption and travel, the apolitical illustrated magazines may be justly labelled ‘bourgeois’—they depict a socially and culturally specific sphere of activity. While Kurt Korff, the Edi- tor-in-chief of the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, had invented the ‘ultra-secret’ and ‘unique’ photographs which occasionally required wiliness not always consistent with the truth, Lorant absolutely refused to accept posed photographs but preferred to develop the idea of the photo-story. Münchner Illustrierte Presse explored much of the technological potential of photography. The magazine attempted to educate its reader’s eyes and to develop an entire psychology of vision and a cult of observing. One part of this visual education was the photo-essay or photograph depicting crowds or famous individuals watching something, which may or may not be in frame: the ‘observers observed’ motif. This motif encompasses photographs of children eyes aglow, watching a puppet show; crowd reactions at a horse ― 249 ― race; and Stanley Baldwin and Sir Samuel Hoare watching an air show.9 ） These photo-essays or photographs suggest that all men are spectators of one sort or another: only the observed object changes. In fact, that object is less important that the act of seeing. One’s reaction is usually the same: open-mouthed awe. Another aspect of the Münchner Illustrierte Presse’s education of the sens- es was its stress on perspective and visual tricks. ‘Are Photos Documents?’ was the title of an early page on trick photography.10） The objectivity of photography was thrown into doubt by lessons revealing possibilities of individ- ual taste, as well as distortion or manipulation.

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