The dawn of travel photography, pre-digital automatic photography and the beginning of the selfie
I love the unusual, the unexpected and the illuminating. Round Trip is a wonderful example of all that. The show is a selection of 43 photographs from UCLA’s collection of 400 all made by two amateur photographers as they traversed Asia Minor from Athens to Tashkent on their bicycles in 1890-91. William Sachtleben and Thomas Allen Jr. were avid cyclists and great promoters of the then new “safety cycles” – bicycles with two equal sized wheels instead on one large and one small one. In 1890 they set out to ride their bikes around the world and they took with them another recent invention, George Eastman’s new Kodak roll film camera.
Until two years before, photography had been a cumbersome business with plates and focusing cloths and a substantial amount of technical knowledge required to make a picture. Eastman had changed all of that with the invention of his “box” camera. It contained a roll of film long enough to make a hundred exposures, used a simple porthole to view the frame and made a circular image so the amateur didn’t have to worry about horizon lines. No focus, no exposure controls, no worries, nothing to do but press the button…sound familiar?
So Sachtleben and Allen took two of these cameras along and made…travel pictures, personal images to show the world the back roads of the Middle East from Iran to Uzbekistan. The photographs are wonderful. They reveal a world of small towns and great wildernesses, of endless roads paved with rocks and cobblestones – if they are paved at all. We see a world where a bicycle or a camera is a great novelty and a Westerner the biggest novelty of all. There is also an unexpected treat. Sachtleben kept meticulous notes with each photograph and curator, David Herlihy uses them to explain the pictures which are arranged chronologically so there is a story told along the way.
Viewing the exhibit, newly made 20” prints nicely mounted in the hallways surrounding a lush interior courtyard at the Fowler Museum, you learn the details of their travel, the unwanted escorts they sometimes ditched, the girl that Allen desired, a hundred details that turn old dry bones into…a blog from the past. And because it seems what we do from the moment photography is invented is to take pictures of ourselves there are many selfies, Sachtleben and Allen posing with officials, dignitaries and locals, a glimpse of life at the beginning of the age of photographic awareness.
You will not find seminal first time aesthetic here. These are not photographs made for photography’s sake. Rather here you can see the beginning of the great populist outpouring which has become a billion pictures a day. Round Trip offers us the opportunity to learn something immediate and personal about photography and life as it was lived at the close of the nineteenth century.
EXHIBITION
Round Trip
from December 14th, 2014 till April 5th, 2015
The Fowler Museum UCLA
308 Charles E. Young Drive North
Los Angeles, CA 90095
USA
Phone: (310) 825-4361
Email: [email protected]http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/current
Written by Andy Romanoff
Additional photos by Andy Romanoff, all rights reserved
website: http://andyromanoff.zenfolio.com/
