- Spira, S. F., Eaton S. Lothrop, Jr., and Jonathan B. Spira.
The History of Photography As Seen Through the Spira Collection.
Danville, NJ: Aperture, 2001.
ISBN 978-0-89381-953-8.
-
If you perused the back pages of photographic magazines in the 1960s
and 1970s, you'll almost certainly recall the pages of advertising
from Spiratone, which offered a panoply of accessories and gadgets,
many tremendously clever and useful, and some distinctly eccentric
and bizarre, for popular cameras of the epoch. The creation of
Fred Spira, a
refugee from Nazi
anschluss
Austria who arrived in New York almost
penniless, his ingenuity, work ethic, and sense for the needs of
the burgeoning market of amateur photographers built what started
as a one-man shop into a flourishing enterprise, creating standards
such as the “T mount” lenses which persist to the
present day. His company was a pioneer in importing high quality
photographic gear from Japan and instrumental in changing the reputation
of Japan from a purveyor of junk to a top end manufacturer.
Like so many businessmen who succeed to such an extent they redefine
the industries in which they participate, Spira was passionate about
the endeavour pursued by his customers: in his case photography. As
his fortune grew, he began to amass a collection of memorabilia from
the early days of photography, and this Spira Collection finally grew
to more than 20,000 items, covering the entire history of photography
from its precursors to the present day.
This magnificent coffee table book draws upon items from the Spira
collection to trace the history of photography from the
camera obscura
in the 16th century to the dawn of digital photography in the 21st.
While the pictures of items from the collection dominate the pages, there
is abundant well-researched text sketching the development of photography,
including the many blind alleys along the way to a consensus of how images
should be made. You can see the fascinating process by which a design,
which initially varies all over the map as individual inventors try
different approaches, converges upon a standard based on customer consensus
and market forces. There is probably a lesson for biological evolution
somewhere in this. With inventions which appear, in retrospect, as simple
as photography, it's intriguing to wonder how much earlier they might
have been discovered: could a Greek artificer have stumbled on the trick
and left us, in some undiscovered cache, an image of Pericles making
the declamation recorded by
Thucydides?
Well, probably not—the
simplest photographic process, the
daguerreotype,
requires a plate of copper, silver, and mercury sensitised with
iodine. While the metals were all known in antiquity (along with glass
production sufficient to make a crude lens or, failing that, a pinhole),
elemental iodine was not isolated until 1811, just 28 years before Daguerre
applied it to photography. But still, you never know….
This book is out of print, but used copies are generally available
for less than the cover price at its publication in 2001.
June 2010 