BOOK REVIEW HOLIDAY SPECIAL SECTION : The Honest Camera

As we lurch toward the millennium the mounting evidence documenting man’s behavior over the past century isn’t looking good. For proof of that go no further than this year’s crop of photography books, a disturbing number of which seem to focus on war photography.

Far and away the most powerful of these is “Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945.� Shot the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Yamahata’s 119 images make up the most extensive documentation in existence of the effects of nuclear warfare. First published in 1952 and reissued this year to accompany a traveling exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, these pictures are devastating.

Yamahata was 28 on Aug. 10th, 1945, when the Japanese army dispatched him to Nagasaki to take photographs for use as propaganda to promote continuation of the war. He arrived at dawn, 24 hours after the bomb fell, spent 12 hours shooting pictures, then left on a five o’clock train as he’d been ordered.

He recalls arriving in the city in early morning darkness illuminated by blue flames rising from dead bodies. At the bomb’s epicenter he found no corpses to photograph because all living beings and objects there had been reduced to powder. The survivors who roamed the streets searching for loved ones were in a state of psychological obliteration the Japanese called “muga-muchu,� which translates as “without self.� All this is captured in the indescribable images by Yamahata, who died suddenly of a violent illness 21 years later.

The year after Yamahata created this crucial record, American photographer John Vachon was sent to cover the United Nations relief effort in Poland. The results of that assignment appear in “Poland, 1946: The Photographs and Letters of John Vachon,� yet another harrowing essay on the aftermath of war. Arriving in Poland shortly after its major cities had been reduced to rubble and 6 million of its citizens killed, Vachon found himself in the midst of a chaos so extreme it approached the surreal. Its borders unclear, currency unstable, cities overrun with carpetbagging foreigners, shortages of everything, histories erased, Poland nonetheless struck Vachon as a movingly dignified country.

Vachon’s letters, written over the seven months he spent there, speak of the conflict he felt over the fact that his job--to take pictures illustrating the good work of the U.N.--was at odds with his very real interest in the Polish people. Fiercely idealistic, he fortunately heeded the call of his higher instincts to take good pictures and concerned himself not at all with U.N. propaganda. A fascinating afterword by Vachon’s daughter, Ann Vachon, fills in the blanks of things only hinted at in her father’s letters. We learn that he was alcoholic and that the recipient of his letters, his wife Penny Vachon, committed suicide in 1960, 14 years prior to his death in 1974. The knowledge of Vachon’s own suffering lends added weight to the tenderness he clearly felt for the people he photographed in Poland.

After the global nightmare of World War II you’d think the human race would have learned its lesson, but no; next up? Vietnam. In “Tim Page: Mid-Term Report,� the fourth book by British photojournalist Tim Page, we travel with him as he drifts into Indochina in the early 1960s, a self-described “pre-hippie� with no particular goal in mind. Before long, however, he found himself photographing the escalating war there for $100 a day and, as he says, “sliding into the deep end of the pool of life.�

Including images from bodies of work Page completed after a wound forced him to leave Vietnam, this book--which includes a nakedly personal autobiographical text--is essentially the story of his long emotional recovery from the war. He spent much of the ‘70s subsisting on $2,000 a year while struggling with booze, drugs and violent memories, yet he never stopped taking pictures. He completed photo essays on a Cuban mental hospital/prison, wacky doings in Southern California and various conflicts in the Middle East. In the end though, it’s Page’s images of Vietnam that cost him the most to make, and those are the ones that resonate most powerfully.

David Hume Kennerly was UPI’s bureau chief in Saigon in the early ‘70s and won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for his work there. His war photography is but a small slice of “Photo Op,� a visual essay on the America of the baby-boom years. Including 250 images documenting 30 years of U.S. history, the book opens with his early work covering politicians, entertainers and athletes, then kicks into gear when he gets overseas. Combined with his first-person text, Kennerly’s pictures of Vietnam are a testament to the physical stamina, courage and compassion required to be a war photographer.

The book goes a little wonky, however, when Kennerly gets back to the States and is appointed official White House photographer for the Ford and Reagan administrations. For starters, how many images of Reagan and Ford does any book need? Yet Kennerly gives us lots--printed small, no less. He should have picked one good picture of each and printed it big. More problematic is the fact that Kennerly fails to make the connection that the guys in suits he captures yukking it up in the Oval Office had more than a little to do with the horrors he witnessed in Vietnam. One can only surmise he was seduced by being treated as an insider by powerful men.

Tina Modotti wasn’t a war photographer but she was certainly an artist whose life revolved around politics. In Sarah M. Lowe’s “Tina Modotti Photographs,� the first comprehensive look at her life and art, we learn that Modotti was born in Italy in 1896 and emigrated to San Francisco in 1913. Five years later she married and moved to Los Angeles, only to have her husband die of smallpox in 1922. Modotti was having an affair with photographer Edward Weston at the time of her husband’s death, and in 1923 she moved with him to Mexico. It was there she became a Marxist while Weston taught her the rudiments of photography.

Modotti only took pictures during the seven years she lived in Mexico, yet the body of work she completed in that brief period is a rich and varied one. Hammering out an original style that synthesized Modernism and the traditional culture of Mexico, she documented the Mexican mural movement of the late ‘20s, worked extensively in portraiture and still-life and made many images designed to overtly express her political convictions.

She ended her thriving career as a photographer in 1930 after her lover, an outspoken political activist, was gunned down in a Mexican street while she was with him. After being accused and cleared of his murder, she was deported to Holland, drifted to Berlin, then settled in Moscow determined to give her all to “the Party.� Her time in the Soviet Union proved to be bitterly disillusioning and in 1939 she returned to the United States, only to be refused entry and shipped off on a boat of refuges from the Spanish Civil War destined for Mexico. She died in a taxi in Mexico City in 1942. She was just 46 and most of her friends believed she met with foul play.

Modotti’s work languished in obscurity until 1966 when it was rediscovered largely as a result of the feminist movement and the leftist politics of that decade. The subject of a comprehensive exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art that opens next month at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts (this excellent book is the show’s catalogue), Modotti comes to us today as a woman whose art served her far better than did her political idealism.

Lest we close on a bleak note, it should be said that the lovely things continue to endure. If you find yourself in need of an antidote to the books discussed above, you might want to immerse yourself in “Robert Doisneau: A Photographer’s Life,� by Peter Hamilton. Doisneau began documenting the many worlds of his native France in the 1930s, and continued to take pictures up until his death last year. He had a remarkably lyrical eye and every picture he took is perfumed with a sense of the fleeting sweetness of life.

****

NAGASAKI JOURNEY: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945 (Pomegranate Art Books: $29.95; 127 pp.)

POLAND, 1946: The Photographs and Letters of John Vachon. Edited and with an afterword by Ann Vachon, introduction by Brian Moore (Smithsonian: $39.95; 171 pp.)

TINA MODOTTI PHOTOGRAPHS, By Sarah M. Lowe (Abrams: $45; 160 pp.)

PHOTO OP: A Pulitzer Prize-Winning. Photographer Covers Events That Shaped Our Times, By David Hume Kennerly (University of Texas Press: $29.95; 168 pp.)

TIM PAGE: Midterm Report, (Thames and Hudson: $29.95; 112 pp.)

ROBERT DOISNEAU: A Photographer’s Life, By Peter Hamilton (Abbeville: $75; 384 pp.)