An Alternative History of Photography
In the late 1970s, when asked about the future of photography, the German scholar Helmut Gernsheim said: “I don’t think there are any major photographers left to be discovered.” As unserious as the statement reads today, it illustrates an enduring tension. Originating in the heyday of European colonial expansion, photography has always wrestled with questions about how to better survey, assess, predict, and reflect on the medium’s history. An Alternative History of Photography (Prestel, 2022; 256 pages, $55), edited and compiled by Phillip Prodger, adds to this tradition while critiquing its relevance. “Gernsheim’s mistake … was to think of photography as a great white whale,” Prodger writes. “More properly, it is a heaving mass of wriggling eels, writhing this way and that and looping back on itself.”
Drawn from the Solander Collection, with its emphasis on international and forgotten photographers, the
