the fast photographer, where you could ‘take a picture’ at the beginning of the 20th century

Some unknown histories are so beautiful that you would prefer not to share them with anyone, because you like to keep the acquired knowledge to yourself for one hundred percent selfish considerations. After all, the chest swells with superiority at the knowledge that you know an exciting story that everyone else is ignorant of. No, it’s not a nice thought, but when you read The Fast Photographer – A History of the Modern Portrait it was not easy to resist the urge to hide. So amazing how the knowledge of an important, previously unrecorded episode from the early days of popular photography has faded from our collective memory.

The fast photographer, by the photo historian Róman Kienjet who works at the Rijksmuseum, describes the emergence of early (commercial) portrait photography for the general public, a phenomenon that spread mainly in the United States at the end of the 19th century and that also captivated Europe: between 1912 and 1920 there were more than 150 studios in the Netherlands alone where so-called rapid photography was practiced. The term refers to the unprecedented short period between recording and printing. The fast techniques in the darkroom enabled production and low prices.

We know that photography was invented more or less simultaneously in London and Paris in 1839. That the creation of a photo – maximum edition of 1 piece – was at first an excruciatingly slow and laborious affair, with extremely long (hours-long) recording times and a lot of fiddling with the preparation of light-sensitive material, and that preserving the image, the fixing was quite a challenge.

We must still be thankful to the pioneers, such as Frenchman Nadar, who dared to descend with camera and torch into the dark Parisian catacombs to make the general public shudder at the sight of the hundreds of thousands of chars piled there. Nadar, who took a bird’s eye view from a hot air balloon. And his fellow frontiersmen, who took horse-drawn labs on wheels into the high mountains to capture photos of glaciers that the general public had never seen with their own eyes. They fully explored the unprecedented possibilities of photography and unfolded the potential of the new medium like a fan.

They paved the way for photography that has definitively broadened and changed our view of the world, the news and other cultures. Their names – Nadar, Fox Talbot, Daguerre – are carved into our memories and monuments. But what about the photographers who, at the beginning of the 20th century, provided the masses with their own images for a penny? So that everyone could get a portrait of himself, once a privilege for the elite, and his throne would be kept for his children and children’s children? The names of the facilitating photographers have been forgotten, just as their groundbreaking work has eluded all of us. Fortunately, Kienjet is there to rectify that.

In his book, Kienjet describes how, in the age of great technical progress, such as electrification, the arrival of cars and airplanes, mass production on the assembly line, and economic growth, portrait photography has largely escaped the chic photo studios. How innovations caused established, unpretentious portrait photographers to be shocked and disgusted by competition from colleagues who prioritized rapid delivery of their images and affordability to the general public over artistic ambitions. Expensive artistry gave way to cheap mass production, greatly lowering the studio’s threshold for the general public to be portrayed.

‘Just press the button and you’re on it. London New York, Cologne and Paris. Feel free to come by bike’, was the slogan used by so-called Tip Top studios to promote themselves in advertisements. Hip names and boastful international allure were part of this. No fatter behind the camera, but the customer himself pressed the record button: the ultimate democratization of the medium, which gave you the feeling of being the master of your own photographic universe. The manual development and printing behind the scenes did not diminish the excitement.

The technological leaps forward (simple development processes, the introduction of cheap roll film negatives, cameras and plate negatives that allowed multiple portrait shots) must have amazed the general public of the early 20th century as much as the digital revolution (the Internet, taking and sending photos and videos by email). cell phone) has done so in the 21st century. It may not immediately lead to better compositions, but it did lead to much cheaper prints. For example, the Automatic Photo Company offered 12 photos for 50 cents.

Fast photographers settled in the centers of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, but also in numerous provincial cities, Alkmaar, Groningen, Haarlem, Gouda, Gorredijk, in places where the shopping and entertainment public could easily be tempted to make an impulse visit to the studio: opposite the cinema in the Langestraat in Alkmaar, on the Nieuwendijk and the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam, or in the old Electro cinema in Veendam, where the American Snelphotography Foto Cie had moved in.

As it often happens when entrepreneurs detect a craze and smell money, so it was with the fast photo studios: they often disappeared as quickly as they appeared. The investments were relatively small: for 750 guilders (currently 8,000 euros) a studio could be furnished that yielded 200 guilders a month. If one fast photographer established himself in a shopping street, he could often expect a competitor in the neighboring building.

Kienjet pays special attention to the invention of the Russian Anatol Josepho, who emigrated to America. After a short career as an assistant speed photographer, he got the idea for the so-called Photomaton, especially in Shanghai, where he had established himself as a portrait and speed photographer. His ‘Automatic Photographic Machine’ became the first fully automatic photo machine. One that didn’t falter, as other attempts often did, but worked adequately and tirelessly spit out portraits.

Josepho set his first Photomaton on Broadway in New York in 1927. Four years later, a similar ‘photo booth’ followed in the Bijenkorf department store in Amsterdam, where on the day of commissioning a row of tens of meters of candidates for an automatically produced portrait. Josepho had already sold his invention by then, for the astronomical sum of a million dollars. Investors took it for granted, fell victim to fraud or went under in the stock market crash of 1929, when Amsterdam had only just welcomed the novelty. Similar photo machines, however, continued to exist, whether or not under different brand names: at fairs, markets, in gambling halls the public was still enticed. And the great-grandchildren of the Photomaton can still be found in the margins of the departure halls of train stations, also in the Netherlands.

The fortunes of the Photomaton are symptomatic of the decline of rapid photography as a whole. After the craze, habituation followed, the fun was lost and at most when someone needed a passport photo, he still crawled into the cubicle. From the twenties and thirties, more and more photo enthusiasts purchased a camera that had become affordable, with which they could take their own snapshots and take their selfies avant la lettre. The heyday of fast photography was definitely over.

The fact that the phenomenon has left so few testimonials, apart from yellowed pictures in dusty family albums in cellars and attics, is undoubtedly due to the relative anonymity of the entrepreneurs. These were not ‘authors’ who left artistic traces. But the background of the enterprising fast photographers also plays a role: many were Jewish. They perished during the Holocaust, and with them the stories they could have told generations to come.

The pages that Kienjet has set aside for the wonderful collection of quick photos that he has collected in many archives are numerous. With the distance of a century they look us straight in the face: the ladies in their hats, the gentlemen in the smart suits, the girls in their Sunday dresses, the boys with their caps on. They look at us earnestly – the stain of the eternal selfie smile has not been left on their faces – but also uninhibited: the lack of the photographer in front of them did not mean they had to overcome their shyness. And thus, though they have turned to dust, they all come almost tangibly close.